As noted in the documentation , Tesseract performs poorly when the page is at an angle (not a multiple of 90 degrees). This limitation is not problematic from an accuracy standpoint, as Tesseract accurately reports the angle of text lines, so my existing pipeline rotates and re-runs recognition on any image where the angle is significant. However, this is computationally inefficient as there does not appear to be any way to get the page angle without also running recognition (despite estimating page angle/gradient being one of the first things calculated).

Therefore, it would be of significant benefit to be able to get the page angle without running the entire recognition process. I'll work on a build that does this myself--my initial thought is to add a config option that tells Tesseract to report the page angle and quit early (before recognition) if median line angle is above a user-defined threshold, however let me know if others have thoughts on implementation.