How do I install Tesseract OCR onto WAMP server, to be run by PHP?

Question

I am attempting to install the OCR software Tesseract onto my WAMP server so that I can then automate the OCR process for some images. When I search for how to install software onto a WAMP server, all I get back is how to install a WAMP server so that route turned up no answers. I have successfully installed Tesseract on my computer and know that the files I am using work properly, my issue is that I am unable to run Tesseract from a PHP script. I used the Windows installer that is provided and installed it to my www directory in WAMP. I then attempted to use the PHP exec() to perform some OCR and got no output. This is my simple script:

<?php
    $path = getenv('PATH');
    putenv("PATH=$path:/usr/local/bin");
    $src = 'a.jpg';
    $srcImg = imagecreatefromjpeg($src);

    $img = imagecreatetruecolor($newClanWidth, $newHeight);
    imagecopyresampled($img, $srcImg, 0, 0, $positions["aPlayer"], $positions[0], $newClanWidth, $newHeight, $clanWidth, $height);
    imagejpeg($img, 'temp.jpg', 100);
    echo '<pre>';
    exec('tesseract temp.jpg out');
    //echo file_get_contents('out.txt');
    echo '</pre>';
    imagedestroy($img);
?>

The image is being saved correctly. I can change the positions in the imagecopyresampled() and the image is changed accordingly. I suspect my problem is with the installation since everywhere I look everyone says to use exec() just like I would from a command line. I have also tried specifying the command like Tesseract-OCR/tesseract.exe temp.jpg out . The Tesseract-OCR folder is in the same directory as my PHP script. I admit to being new to this, so please bear with me if there is something simple I've overlooked. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

what do you mean by "successfully installed Tesseract" ? how did you verify that? can you run tesseract.exe -v and get proper in command line (or however you call CMD on windows these days)?

if this works, than make sure that you get the same results by doing this via php:

make sure that you have errors turned on: error_reporting(-1) and check if you are getting any errors. than try if you actually can execute tesseract via php by:

$return = shell_exec('tesseract.exe -v'); // in your example you miss .exe it would be without extension on linux
var_dump($return);

(shell_exec returns the all output, compare to exec what returns just the last line)

if that works, than try setting absolute path while extracting:

imagejpeg($img, 'c:/temp.jpg', 100);
$return = exec('tesseract.exe temp.jpg c:/out');
var_dump($report); // in case it gives you some errors
$content = file_get_contents('c:/out.txt');
if ($content === false) die('something is still wrong');
// otherwise process $content

if nothing helps, than share your results/errors.

last hint: try to install linux