TRex 1.9 expands macOS OCR to 100+ languages with Tesseract
The free macOS OCR app TRex has been updated to version 1.9, bringing a major boost to language coverage by integrating the open-source Tesseract OCR engine. With Tesseract on board, TRex can now recognize 100+ languages, far beyond the roughly 26 languages previously supported when the app relied solely on Apple’s Vision framework.
- What’s new: Tesseract integration adds broad multilingual OCR, improving recognition on mixed-language documents.
- Before vs. after: Apple Vision’s on-device OCR supported ~26 languages; Tesseract expands that to 100+.
- Use cases: Extract text from screenshots, PDFs, images, and UI elements—handy for research, coding, translation, and accessibility.
- Availability: TRex remains free for macOS; update to v1.9 to access the new language options.
How it helps: Broader language support reduces errors on non-English documents and mixed scripts. For students, journalists, and developers, this means faster capture of accurate text from diverse sources without switching tools.
Getting started: After updating, check TRex’s settings to select desired languages. You may need to download language data for Tesseract the first time you enable a given language.
Learn more:
Apple Vision: Text recognition ·
Tesseract OCR (GitHub) ·
Search the Mac App Store for TRex
Note: Specific language accuracy can vary by font, quality, and script. For best results, use high-contrast images and consider pre-processing (deskewing, denoising) when possible.
Discussion: Which languages do you need OCR for most often, and what’s your go-to workflow on macOS?