Community Apple XCFramework distribution for Tesseract (iOS/macOS arm64)

[lexiaoyao20]

Your Feature Request

Hi Tesseract team,

I maintain a community binary distribution for Apple platforms and wanted to share it in case it’s useful to list as an option for macOS/iOS users.

• Repo: https://github.com/lexiaoyao20/tesseract-Apple (build/packaging scripts only; no upstream patches;).
• Artifact: Tesseract.xcframework with arm64 slices for iOS (device + simulator) and macOS 11+. Built statically with zlib 1.3.1, libpng 1.6.40, libjpeg-turbo 3.0.0, libtiff 4.6.0, and Leptonica 1.84.1. Tessdata is not included; users add their own.
• Distribution: Can be consumed via Swift Package Manager (binary target) or CocoaPods (binary pod). Current upstream version tracked: 5.5.1.
  • SPM example: .package(url: "https://github.com/lexiaoyao20/tesseract-Apple.git", from: "5.5.1")
  • CocoaPods example: pod 'Tesseract', :git => 'https://github.com/lexiaoyao20/tesseract-Apple.git'
• Automation: A GitHub Actions workflow checks tesseract-ocr/tesseract daily and on manual trigger. When a new numeric tag appears, it builds macOS + iOS binaries on macos-latest, packages the XCFramework, uploads to a GitHub Release, and updates Package.swift/Tesseract.podspec with the URL + checksum.
• Extras: build.sh supports local rebuilds (e.g., ENABLE_IOS=0 for macOS-only). There’s a small UIKit sample under demo/macos showing usage of the XCFramework.
• Limitations: Apple Silicon only (macOS arm64); iOS is arm64 for device and simulator; no macOS x86_64 slice yet. No upstream code changes—this is just convenience packaging.

If this looks helpful, I’d be glad to have it mentioned in your docs/wiki as a community-maintained Apple binary option. Feedback welcome, and I’m happy to align with any guidance you have.

[Rare-streak]

This looks really helpful, especially for anyone working with Tesseract on macOS or iOS. The automated builds and XCFramework packaging make things much easier compared to setting everything up manually. Thanks for putting this together and sharing it here I think a lot of Apple-platform developers will find it useful.