A Hebrew traineddata for ocrmypdf -l heb_rivok (Hebrew + English + digits)

[RivoksLab]

For anyone OCRing Hebrew PDFs: we released heb_rivok, a Tesseract model fine-tuned from tessdata_best's script/Hebrew on Hebrew and mixed Hebrew/English lines. Drop the file into your tessdata folder, as the language docs describe, then run:

ocrmypdf -l heb_rivok in.pdf out.pdf

On whole pages (our measurements):

• 4 invoices, words found: 93.6% (vs 89.5% for Ubuntu's heb, 91.4% for tessdata_best script/Hebrew)
• 34 multi-column 19th-century newspaper pages, words wrong or out of reading order: 32.3% (vs 47.9% for Ubuntu's heb+eng)

On real document lines the character error rate drops from 4.7% (Ubuntu's heb) to 1.4%.

One Apache-2.0 file of 5.7 MB: https://huggingface.co/Rivok/tesseract-heb-rivok. SHA-256: dd9ba506b4ec6e62119a1334949824137692eada686687e51ac10dbb2f7a3df8.

Limits:

• Lines with as many English as Hebrew words come out left to right, because of Tesseract's direction rule (Short Hebrew lines with English words come out with the English first (CurrentParagraphIsLtr breaks ties to LTR) tesseract-ocr/tesseract#4680).
• For text-layer problems with Hebrew in the output PDF, see fpdf2 renderer: numbers and Latin inside RTL words come out reversed (ב-2024 extracts as ב-4202) #1781, fpdf2 renderer: words in right-to-left lines get no separating space, so extractors glue them #1782 and Hebrew words with attached punctuation or digits fall back to the glyphless font, though installed fonts cover them #1783.

I'm the author (Rivok Labs); this post was written with AI help. Happy to answer questions.

Edited 2026-11-07: updated for version 1.0.1, which fixed the column order on multi-column pages.

[RivoksLab]

Update: heb_rivok 1.0.1 is out and fixes the column order, so plain ocrmypdf -l heb_rivok now works on multi-column pages. On the same 34 newspaper pages, 32.3% of words come out wrong or out of reading order, against 47.9% for Ubuntu's heb+eng. Line-level text is unchanged from 1.0.

New SHA-256: dd9ba506b4ec6e62119a1334949824137692eada686687e51ac10dbb2f7a3df8. Release notes: https://github.com/RivoksLab/tesseract-heb-rivok/releases/tag/v1.0.1