Chromebooks are generally looked down upon when it comes to performing heavy operations related to digital publishing, media conversion, photo editing, and so on. However, there are certain ways you can perform many of the tasks if you have the penchant to solve problems. In this article, we are taking a look at how to run a powerful offline OCR tool on a Chromebook. You will be able to convert images and non-searchable documents using a powerful OCR service. So on that note, let’s go ahead and find the instructions to perform OCR conversion on a Chromebook.

Here, we are going to use the powerful Tesseract OCR service that is open-source, free, and maintained by Google. Since it’s a command-line tool, we will be using gImageReader which is developed on Tesseract’s engine. It has a GUI interface and works really well without any issues.

  • Set Up Offline OCR Tool
  • Run gImageReader on a Chromebook

Set Up Offline OCR Tool on a Chromebook

  1. First of all, enable Linux and set up Wine on your Chromebook by following our linked guides. The process is a bit lengthy but certainly doable.

  2. Now, open the Linux terminal and run the below command to install gImageReader. It will start a setup wizard just like Windows. So just click on “Next” and install the application.

  3. After the installation, execute the below command in the Linux Terminal to run gImageReader. Make sure to change username to the actual username you have assigned to Linux on your Chromebook. To find it, check the initial name before @penguin under the Linux Terminal. That’s your username.

  4. Now, the OCR tool will open up on your Chromebook. Click on the “File” icon to get started.

  5. This is what the converted document looks like. The conversion is absolutely on point with minimal errors. For good measures, I also threw a heavy file (36MB) having 41 pages and it converted the whole file like a charm.

Our tutorial will work with all of the following Chromebooks. It is not an exhaustive list and is only here to serve as an example.

Use Tesseract OCR on a Chromebook Using gImageReader

So that is how you can run an offline OCR tool on a Chromebook with help of Linux and Wine. Sure, the installation process is a bit tedious but once you have set it up, it’s immensely helpful to convert OCR files to searchable PDFs in a jiffy.