If you have checked out Tesseract from Subversion, you must generate the configure script.

So, the steps for making Tesseract are:

  * ./runautoconf  # ignore warnings
  * ./configure
  * make
  * make install

Note that ./runautoconf may generate some warnings:

 -- quoting in some /usr/share/.../... .m4 files
 -- old uses of datarootdir

They don't seem to hurt anything.  We haven't found a good way of eliminating them yet.