Installation

TesseRACt can be installed from either PyPI or from the source distribution.

Installing from PyPI

The easiest way to install TesseRACt is using pip. If you have administrative privleges on the target machine, this is done using:

$ pip install tesseract

If you do not have admin privleges, simply install it locally using:

$ pip install tesseract --user

The TesseRACt package can then be updated to the most recent stable release using:

$ pip install tesseract --upgrade

Installing from the Source Distribution

The most recent TesseRACt source distribution can be obtained by either downloading or cloning the repository from Bitbucket. Using Mercurial this is done by issuing the following command:

$ hg clone https://[username]@bitbucket.org/[username]/tesseract

where [username] should be replaced with your Bitbucket username. The Bitbucket repository is currently private. If you would like access to this repository, please contact Meagan Lang.

Once you have the TesseRACt source distribution, move into the distribution directory:

$ cd tesseract

and use the standard Distutils command to build and install the distribution:

$ python setup.py install

If you do not have administrative privleges, this can be done using:

$ python setup.py install --user

Testing the Install

To test that everything was installed propertly. From the python prompt, import TesseRACt:

>>> import tesseract

and try to access the documentation:

>>> help(tesseract)

Additional tests can be found in Tutorials.

The First Import

The first time you run import tesseract, a few things will happen. First, a user config file .tessrc will be created in your home directory. This file is used to control different aspects of TesseRACt which are explained in The Config File. Second, you will be prompted to enter a directory in which qhull will be installed. This directory will be added to the user configuration file, which can be changed at any time if you move qhull.