Iron OCR can use the Tesseract 3, Tesseract 4, and Tesseract 5 engine. It provides these on Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems, and everything you need is installed automatically when you install the Iron OCR NuGet package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/

Tesseract itself is a command line executable which may not be appropriate for using in real-world scenarios such as web applications. Iron OCR provides the latest Tesseract 5 technology directly to .NET developers without requiring them to install Tesseract onto their host operating system manually. We find that Iron OCR provides an advanced image sampling and upscaling technology, ensuring that even low quality scans get great results with Iron Tesseract: https://ironsoftware.com/csharp/ocr/tutorials/c-sharp-tesseract-ocr/

Iron OCR can be used in any type of .NET project. We find it is regularly popular in the development of server applications and desktop applications. We have also seen customers use it within web applications to scan uploaded content and turn it into text, which can then be purposed for another use, such as a database.

Iron OCR allows us to read image files, such as TIFFs, JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs, in .NET using Tesseract. Iron OCR (https://ironsoftware.com/csharp/ocr/) also provides PDF OCR technology using Tesseract within .NET applications.

You will be able to find code examples on the Iron Software website showing how to use Iron OCR as a Tesseract alternative for .NET and C# projects. It includes examples of PDF OCR using Tesseract in C#. Please also find information on licensing here: https://ironsoftware.com/csharp/ocr/licensing/

Iron OCR allows developers to treat PDFs as if they were scanned images and provides full functionality for PDF OCR. This includes not only reading PDFs and turning them back into plain text, but also producing PDFs. Iron OCR can use its Tesseract engine to create a search indexable PDF from a flat PDF or image-based contet.