Windows OCR

Supported languages

The default language used will be based on your Windows system language (OCR language packs are available for install)

Windows OCR can only recognize languages that have the OCR language pack installed

The list can be obtained via PowerShell by running the following commands:

[Windows.Media.Ocr.OcrEngine, Windows.Foundation, ContentType = WindowsRuntime]

[Windows.Media.Ocr.OcrEngine]::AvailableRecognizerLanguages

How to query for OCR language packs

To return the list of support language packs, open PowerShell as an Administrator (right-click, then select "Run as Administrator"), and enter the following command:

Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object { $_.Name -Like 'Language.OCR*' }

An example output:

Name  : Language.OCR~~~en-GB~0.0.1.0
State : NotPresent

Name  : Language.OCR~~~en-US~0.0.1.0
State : Installed

Name  : Language.OCR~~~ja-JP~0.0.1.0
State : NotPresent

The language and location is abbreviated, so "en-US" would be "English-United States" and "en-GB" would be "English-Great Britain". If a language is not available in the output, then it's not supported by OCR.

How to install an OCR language pack

The following commands install the OCR pack for "ja-JP":

$Capability = Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object { $_.Name -Like 'Language.OCR~~~ja-JP~0.0.1.0' }

$Capability | Add-WindowsCapability -Online