TesseractNotFoundError: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your PATH. See README file for more information.

The error message "TesseractNotFoundError: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your PATH" indicates that the Tesseract OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine is either not installed on your system or that your system's PATH environment variable does not include the location of the Tesseract executable. Here's how you can resolve this issue:

1. Check if Tesseract is installed:

   • On Windows, open Command Prompt and type tesseract --version.
   • On MacOS or Linux, open Terminal and type tesseract --version.

   If Tesseract is installed, you should see the version number. If you get an error message saying the command is not found, then Tesseract is not installed.

2. Install Tesseract:

   • On Windows, download the installer from the official Tesseract GitHub repository and run it.
   • On MacOS, you can install Tesseract using Homebrew with the command brew install tesseract.
   • On Linux, you can install Tesseract using the package manager, e.g., sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr for Debian/Ubuntu-based systems.

3. Add Tesseract to your PATH:

   • On Windows:
     • Search for 'Environment Variables' in the start menu and select 'Edit the system environment variables'.
     • Click on the 'Environment Variables' button.
     • Under 'System Variables', find the 'Path' variable and click 'Edit'.
     • Add the path to the Tesseract executable (e.g., C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR) to the list.
     • Click 'OK' to save the changes.
   • On MacOS/Linux, you can add Tesseract to your PATH by adding a line to your .bash_profile, .bashrc, or .zshrc file, such as export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/tesseract.

4. Verify the PATH:

   • Restart your command line tool and type tesseract --version to verify that Tesseract is now recognized.

5. If you're using Tesseract within a Python environment:

   • Make sure you have the pytesseract Python wrapper installed (pip install pytesseract).
   • If you still encounter the error even after installing Tesseract and confirming it's in your PATH, you might need to explicitly point to the Tesseract executable in your Python code:

import pytesseract

# Point pytesseract to where the Tesseract executable is located
pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r'C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe'  # Update the path as needed

After following these steps, the "TesseractNotFoundError" should be resolved, and you should be able to use Tesseract for OCR tasks in your projects.