Fedora Account System
Red Hat Associate
Red Hat Customer
In Rawhide (updated as of 2026-01-30), OCR functionality is not available even when tesseract has been installed. When I start Spectacle and go to Options >> Configure Spectacle, the "Text Recognition (OCR)" section of the dialog says "OCR functionality is not available". Clicking the (i) button next to that gives a popup saying "Please install the required packages: * tesseract * tesseract language data (e.g., tesseract-ocr-eng for English). This is despite the fact that the 'tesseract' and 'tesseract-langpack-eng' packages are both installed. When I do the above by starting Spectacle from a terminal, I see these messages: spectacle: Unable to load Tesseract candidate "libtesseract.so.5" : "Cannot load library libtesseract.so.5: libtesseract.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" spectacle: Unable to load Tesseract candidate "libtesseract.so.4" : "Cannot load library libtesseract.so.4: libtesseract.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" spectacle: Unable to load Tesseract candidate "libtesseract.so" : "Cannot load library libtesseract.so: libtesseract.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" spectacle: Unable to locate a suitable Tesseract shared library spectacle: Tesseract runtime library not available spectacle: OCR is not available; language selector will remain empty. The actual locations of the installed libtesseract.so* are: $ sudo find /usr -name "libtesseract.so*" /usr/lib64/libtesseract.so.5.5 /usr/lib64/libtesseract.so.5.5.2 So it appears that Spectacle isn't looking for the libraries in any place that Fedora has them. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora KDE Rawhide and go through initial setup 2. sudo dnf install tesseract 3. Open Spectacle 4. Go to "Options >> Configure Spectacle" Actual Results: The configuration screen says "OCR functionality is not available". Expected Results: OCR functionality should be available and configurable in this screen.
Full list of tesseract-related packages installed: $ dnf list --installed "tesseract*" Installed packages tesseract.x86_64 5.5.2-1.fc44 rawhide tesseract-common.noarch 5.5.2-1.fc44 updates tesseract-langpack-eng.noarch 4.1.0-12.fc44 updates tesseract-libs.x86_64 5.5.2-1.fc44 updates tesseract-tessdata-doc.noarch 4.1.0-12.fc44 updates
And Spectacle: $ dnf list --installed spectacle Installed packages spectacle.x86_64 1:6.5.90-2.fc44 updates
As per https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/spectacle-6-5-5-on-fedora-43-missing-ocr-extract-text-feature-despite-tesseract-being-installed/180072/5: Installing the tesseract-devel package resolves this and makes the OCR feature available. The key seems to be that tesseract-devel installs "/usr/lib64/libtesseract.so", which Spectacle can successfully find.
Retitled the bug to frame it as a package dependency problem - spectacle should have a dependency on tesseract-devel.
This is being worked on.
FEDORA-2026-cc2553c18d (spectacle-6.6.0-2.fc45) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 45. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-cc2553c18d
FEDORA-2026-cc2553c18d (spectacle-6.6.0-2.fc45) has been pushed to the Fedora 45 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.
FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19 (spectacle-6.6.0-2.fc44) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 44. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19
Proposed as a Freeze Exception for 44-beta by Fedora user ngompa using the blocker tracking app because: This fixes Spectacle's ability to load and enable OCR functionality, which is a core feature of it as a screenshot tool.
Changing the description to make things clearer. Declaring a dependency on tesseract-devel is not the correct fix, and is not what the update does.
FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19 has been pushed to the Fedora 44 testing repository. Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command: `sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19` You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19 See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.
Discussed during blocker review meeting on 2026-02-23 [1]: agreed 2435519 - AcceptedFreezeException (Beta) - this is accepted as the fix for a major new feature of a default KDE application [1] https://meetbot-raw.fedoraproject.org//blocker-review_matrix_fedoraproject-org/
FEDORA-2026-ffbad0fb19 (spectacle-6.6.0-2.fc44) has been pushed to the Fedora 44 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.
This has regressed in spectacle 6.6.3-1. On a system with "tesseract-libs" installed (but not "tesseract-devel"), Spectacle again fails to find Tesseract, with the message: ``` spectacle: Unable to load Tesseract candidate "tesseract" : "Cannot load library tesseract: tesseract: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" spectacle: Unable to locate a suitable Tesseract shared library spectacle: Tesseract runtime library not available ``` Experienced by me and another Discourse user: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/spectacle-6-5-5-on-fedora-43-missing-ocr-extract-text-feature-despite-tesseract-being-installed/180072/10 Added a comment to the upstream bug - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516162#c9
My system has the same tesseract version installed and spectacle launches properly: spectacle: Attempting to use Tesseract library "libtesseract.so.5.5" spectacle: Detected Tesseract version "5.5.2" spectacle: Loaded Tesseract runtime library from "libtesseract.so.5.5" What tesseract packages do you have installed? Here are mine: rpm -qa | grep tesseract tesseract-tessdata-doc-4.1.0-12.fc44.noarch tesseract-common-5.5.2-1.fc44.noarch tesseract-langpack-eng-4.1.0-12.fc44.noarch tesseract-libs-5.5.2-1.fc44.x86_64 tesseract-5.5.2-1.fc44.x86_64
I have: $ rpm -qa | grep tesseract tesseract-tessdata-doc-4.1.0-11.fc43.noarch tesseract-langpack-eng-4.1.0-11.fc43.noarch tesseract-common-5.5.2-1.fc43.noarch tesseract-libs-5.5.2-1.fc43.x86_64 and: $ rpm -qa | grep spectacle spectacle-6.6.3-1.fc43.x86_64 (I did try installing "tesseract" itself, but that didn't fix the issue.) Also, I do have "libtesseract.so.5.5.2" and "libtesseract.so.5.5": $ sudo find /usr -name "libtesseract*" /usr/lib64/libtesseract.so.5.5.2 /usr/lib64/libtesseract.so.5.5 So it seems like we both have those library files - but your logs show that your Spectacle detects those files, whereas my Spectacle doesn't (per logs in comment #14).
Nevermind I'm an idiot, I was still on 6.6.2. I'll reapply the previous patch....
FEDORA-2026-f2d6456adb (spectacle-6.6.3-2.fc43) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 43. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-f2d6456adb
FEDORA-2026-189fe0a162 (spectacle-6.6.3-2.fc44) has been submitted as an update to Fedora 44. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-189fe0a162
FEDORA-2026-189fe0a162 (spectacle-6.6.3-2.fc44) has been pushed to the Fedora 44 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.
FEDORA-2026-f2d6456adb (spectacle-6.6.3-2.fc43) has been pushed to the Fedora 43 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.
FEDORA-2026-c942cb4e4d (spectacle-6.6.3-2.fc42) has been pushed to the Fedora 42 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.