Python-tesseract is an optical character recognition (OCR) tool for python. That is, it will recognize and "read" the text embedded in images. Python-tesseract is a wrapper for Google's Tesseract-OCR Engine. It is also useful as a stand-alone invocation script to tesseract, as it can read all image types supported by the Python Imaging Library, including jpeg, png, gif, bmp, tiff, and others, whereas tesseract-ocr by default only supports tiff and bmp. Additionally, if used as a script, Python-tesseract will print the recognized text instead of writing it to a file.