OCR-D/ocrd_all

This controls installation of all OCR-D modules from source (as git submodules).

It includes a Makefile for their installation into a virtual environment (venv) or Docker container.

(A venv is a local user directory with shell scripts to load/unload itself in the current shell environment via PATH and PYTHONHOME.)

(NOTE: If you are going to install ocrd_all, you may want to first reference the OCR-D setup guide at the OCR-D website. If you are a non-IT user, it is especially recommended you utilize the guide.)

• Preconditions
  • Space
  • Locale
  • System packages
• Usage
  • Targets
    • deps-ubuntu
    • modules
    • ocrd
    • all
    • docker
    • clean
    • show
    • help (default goal)
    • [any module name]
    • [any executable name]
  • Variables
    • OCRD_MODULES
    • PYTHON
    • VIRTUAL_ENV
    • TMPDIR
    • PIP_OPTIONS
    • GIT_RECURSIVE
    • TESSERACT_MODELS
    • TESSERACT_CONFIG
  • Examples
  • Results
  • Persistent configuration
  • Docker Hub
• Challenges
  • No published/recent version on PyPI
  • Conflicting requirements
  • System requirements
• Contributing

Preconditions

Space

Make sure that there is enough free disk space. 7 GiB or more is recommended for the required submodules, build data, temporary data, installed virtual environment and pip cache.

If the /tmp directory has less than 5 GiB of free space, you can override the location of temporary files by setting the TMPDIR variable when calling make:

TMPDIR=/path/to/my/tempdir make all

Locale

Next, the (shell) environment must have a Unicode-based localization. (Otherwise Python code based on click will not work, i.e. most OCR-D CLIs.) This is true for most installations today, and can be verified by:

locale | fgrep .UTF-8

This should show several LC_* variables. Otherwise, either select another localization globally...

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

... or use the Unicode-based POSIX locale temporarily:

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
export LANG=C.UTF-8

System packages

Install GNU make, git and GNU parallel.

# on Debian / Ubuntu:
sudo apt install make git parallel

Install wget or curl if you want to download Tesseract models.

# on Debian / Ubuntu:
sudo apt install wget

Install the packages for Python3 development and for Python3 virtual environments for your operating system / distribution.

# on Debian / Ubuntu:
sudo apt install python3-dev python3-venv

Some modules use the Tesseract library. If your distribution provides Tesseract 4.1 or newer, install the development package:

# on Debian / Ubuntu:
sudo apt install libtesseract-dev

Ubuntu packages for Tesseract 5.0.0 (alpha) are available at the PPA https://launchpad.net/~alex-p/+archive/ubuntu/tesseract-ocr-devel.

Otherwise or for the latest Tesseract code it can also be built locally.

Other modules will have additional system dependencies.

System dependencies for all modules on Ubuntu 18.04 (or similar) can also be installed automatically by running:

# on Debian / Ubuntu:
sudo apt install make
sudo make deps-ubuntu

(And you can define the scope of all modules by setting the OCRD_MODULES variable.)

Usage

Run make with optional parameters for variables and targets like so:

make [PYTHON=python3] [VIRTUAL_ENV=./venv] [OCRD_MODULES="..."] [TARGET...]

Targets

deps-ubuntu

Install system packages for all modules. (Depends on modules.)

modules

Download/update all modules, but do not install anything.

all

Install executables from all modules into the venv. (Depends on modules and ocrd.)

ocrd

Install only OCR-D/core and its CLI ocrd into the venv.

docker

(Re-)build a docker image for all modules/executables. (Depends on modules.)

clean

Remove the venv and the modules' build directories.

show

Print the venv directory, the module directories, and the executable names.

check

Verify that all executables are runnable and the venv is consistent.

help (default goal)

Print available targets and variables.

Further targets:

[any module name]

Download/update that module, but do not install anything.

[any executable name]

Install that CLI into the venv. (Depends on that module and on ocrd.)

Variables

OCRD_MODULES

Override the list of git submodules to include. Targets affected by this include:

• deps-ubuntu (reducing the list of system packages to install)
• modules (reducing the list of modules to checkout/update)
• all (reducing the list of executables to install)
• docker (reducing the list of executables and modules to install)
• show (reducing the list of OCRD_MODULES and of OCRD_EXECUTABLES to print)

PYTHON

Name of the Python binary to use (at least python3 required).

VIRTUAL_ENV

Directory prefix to use for local installation.

(This is set automatically when activating a virtual environment on the shell. The build system will re-use the venv if one already exists here, or create one.)

TMPDIR

Override the default path (/tmp on Unix) where temporary files during build are stored.

PIP_OPTIONS

Add extra options to the pip install command like -q or -v or -e.

(The latter will install Python modules in editable mode, i.e. any update to the source will directly affect the executables.)

GIT_RECURSIVE

Set to --recursive to checkout/update all modules recursively. (This usually installs additional tests and models.)

TESSERACT_MODELS

Add more models to the minimum required list of languages (eng equ osd) to install along with Tesseract.

Note: this only affects make install-tesseract (or all), but is independent of the install-models step. (The latter delegates to ocrd resmgr download, which fetches all registered resources.)

TESSERACT_CONFIG

Set configure options for building Tesseract from source (--disable-openmp --disable-shared CXXFLAGS="-g -O2 -fPIC").

Examples

The following examples assume a working development installation of Tesseract. To build the latest Tesseract locally, run this command first:

# Get code, build and install Tesseract with the default English model.
make tesseract

Optionally install additional Tesseract models.

# Download models from tessdata_fast into the venv's tessdata directory.
make frk.traineddata
make script/Latin.traineddata
make script/Fraktur.traineddata

Optionally install Tesseract training tools.

make install-tesseract-training

Running make ocrd or just make downloads/updates and installs the core module, including the ocrd CLI in a virtual Python 3 environment under ./venv.

Running make ocrd-tesserocr-recognize downloads/updates the ocrd_tesserocr module and installs its CLIs, including ocrd-tesserocr-recognize in the venv.

Running make modules downloads/updates all modules.

Running make all additionally installs the executables from all modules.

Running make all OCRD_MODULES="core tesseract ocrd_tesserocr ocrd_cis" installs only the executables from these modules.

Results

To use the built executables, simply activate the virtual environment:

. ${VIRTUAL_ENV:-venv}/bin/activate
ocrd --help
ocrd-...

For the Docker image, run it with your data path mounted as a user:

docker run -it -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v $PWD:/data ocrd/all
ocrd --help
ocrd-...

Persistent configuration

In order to make choices permanent, you can put your variable preferences (or any custom rules) into local.mk. This file is always included if it exists. So you don't have to type (and memorise) them on the command line or shell environment.

For example, its content could be:

# restrict everything to a subset of modules
OCRD_MODULES = core ocrd_im6convert ocrd_cis ocrd_tesserocr tesserocr tesseract

# use a non-default path for the virtual environment
VIRTUAL_ENV = $(CURDIR)/.venv

# install in editable mode (i.e. referencing the git sources)
PIP_OPTIONS = -e

# use non-default temporary storage
TMPDIR = $(CURDIR)/.tmp

# install more languages/models for Tesseract
TESSERACT_MODELS = deu frk script/Fraktur script/Latin

# install all of Tesseract's submodules to support unit tests and training tools, too
tesseract: GIT_RECURSIVE = --recursive

Note: When local.mk exists, variables can still be overridden on the command line, (i.e. make all OCRD_MODULES= will build all executables for all modules again), but not from the shell environment (i.e. OCRD_MODULES= make all will still use the value from local.mk).

Docker Hub

The project is available as prebuilt Docker images from Docker Hub as ocrd/all. You can choose from three tags, minimum, medium and maximum. These differ in which modules are included, with maximum being the equivalent of doing make all with the default (unset) value for OCRD_MODULES. To download the images on the command line:

docker pull ocrd/all:minimum
# or
docker pull ocrd/all:medium
# or
docker pull ocrd/all:maximum

In addition to these base variants, there are minimum-cuda, medium-cuda and maximum-cuda with GPU support. (Also needs nvidia-docker, which adds the docker --gpus option.)

Usage is the same as if you had built the image yourself.

This table lists which tag contains which module:

Note: The following modules have been disabled by default and can only be enabled by explicitly setting OCRD_MODULES or DISABLED_MODULES:

• cor-asv-fst (runtime issues)
• ocrd_ocropy (better implementation in ocrd_cis available)
• ocrd_kraken (currently unmaintained)
• clstm (required only for ocrd_kraken)

Uninstall

If you have installed ocrd_all natively and wish to uninstall, first deactivate the virtual environment and remove the ocrd_all directory:

rm -rf ocrd_all

Next, remove all contents under ~/.parallel/semaphores:

rm -rf ~/.parallel/semaphores

Challenges

This repo offers solutions to the following problems with OCR-D integration.

No published/recent version on PyPI

The following Python modules need an installation from code for different reasons:

• clstm (needs modified code for Python3)
• cor-asv-ann (not available in PyPI)
• cor-asv-fst (not available in PyPI)
• dinglehopper (not available in PyPI)
• tesserocr (too old in PyPI)

(Solved by installation from source.)

Conflicting requirements

Merging all packages into one venv does not always work. Modules may require mutually exclusive sets of dependent packages.

pip does not even stop or resolve conflicts – it merely warns!

• Tensorflow:

  • version 2 (required by ocrd_calamari, ocrd_anybaseocr and ocrd_pc_segmentation)
  • version 1 (required by cor-asv-ann, ocrd_keraslm and sbb_textline_detector)

  The temporary solution is to require different package names:

  • tensorflow>=2
  • tensorflow-gpu==1.15.*

  Both cannot be installed in parallel in different versions, and usually also depend on different versions of CUDA toolkit.)

• OpenCV:

  • opencv-python-headless (required by core and others, avoids pulling in X11 libraries)
  • opencv-python (probably dragged in by third party packages)

  As long as we keep reinstalling the headless variant and no such package attempts GUI, we should be fine. Custom build (as needed for ARM) under the module opencv-python already creates the headless variant.

• PyTorch:

  • torch<1.0
  • torch>=1.0

• ...

(Solved by managing and delegating to different subsets of venvs.)

System requirements

Not all modules advertise their system package requirements via make deps-ubuntu.

• clstm: depends on scons libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libpng-dev libeigen3-dev swig
• tesseract (when installing from source not PPA): depends on libleptonica-dev etc

(Solved by maintaining these requirements under deps-ubuntu here.)

Contributing

Please see our contributing guide to learn how you can support the project.

Acknowledgments

This software uses GNU parallel. GNU Parallel is a general parallelizer to run multiple serial command line programs in parallel without changing them.

Reference

Tange, Ole. (2020). GNU Parallel 20200722 ('Privacy Shield'). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3956817