Tesseract improper setting for TESSDATA_PREFIX, can't find language files

[Steve Martin]

Linux Mint 14.1 32-bit,

Installation of the "tesseract-ocr" package puts language and config files in "/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/", but sets the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable (which is supposed to point to the parent directory of "tessdata") to "/usr/local/share/tessdata/", so Tesseract cannot find its language files and fails to run.

Assuming one is using BASH, putting the following line in ~/.bashrc is a workaround:

     export TESSDATA_PREFIX="/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/"

Permanent fix would be to adjust the setting of the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable that gets installed.