# OCR API

> Text from photos, scans and scanned PDFs, in English and ten Indian languages.

Send a picture or a PDF and get its text back, with Tesseract 5. Name the languages the text uses: English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia and Marathi, up to three at once. Files are read and deleted; nothing is kept or logged.

Base URL `https://api.dharun.dev`. No API key. Answers are JSON, `{ "data": ..., "meta": { ... } }`, and errors are `{ "error": { "code", "message" } }` with a matching HTTP status. Rate limit: 600 requests a minute per client.

## Read the text in a picture or PDF

`POST /v1/ocr`

Returns the text, Tesseract's confidence and, with words=true, every word with its box. A PDF is read up to 10 pages at a time at 300 dpi; a PDF that already holds text is read faster by /v1/pdf/text. Options go in the query string, or as form fields when the file is sent as multipart/form-data.

Send: A picture: JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, BMP or TIFF, up to 10 MB. Or a PDF. Post the file as the request body, or as `multipart/form-data`. Sample file: https://api.dharun.dev/samples/receipt.png

What you send is never written to the log, and the answer is not cached.

Parameters:

- `lang` (query): Languages, joined by + or a comma: eng, hin, tam, tel, kan, mal, ben, guj, pan, ori, mar (or en, ta, hi...). Default eng.
- `words` (query): Also return each word with its confidence and box. One of: true, false.
- `first` (query): PDF: first page to read. Default 1.
- `last` (query): PDF: last page to read; at most 10 pages per request.

Example: `POST` https://api.dharun.dev/v1/ocr?lang=eng+tam

Response, with lists and long text shortened:

```json
{
  "data": {
    "text": "SRI MURUGAN STORES\n12 Car Street, Namakkal 637001\nGSTIN 33AABCS1429B1Z1\n\nBasmati rice 5 kg 575.00\nToor dal 1 kg 168.00\nCoconut oil 1 L 245.00\nFilter coffee 500 …",
    "confidence": 92.8,
    "language": "eng+tam",
    "pages": [
      {
        "page": 1,
        "text": "SRI MURUGAN STORES\n12 Car Street, Namakkal 637001\nGSTIN 33AABCS1429B1Z1\n\nBasmati rice 5 kg 575.00\nToor dal 1 kg 168.00\nCoconut oil 1 L 245.00\nFilter coffee 500 …",
        "confidence": 92.8,
        "width": 709,
        "height": 584
      }
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "note": "confidence is Tesseract's own, 0 to 100, averaged over words. Name every script the text uses in lang."
  }
}
```