Open Source OCR Software
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Browse free open source OCR software and projects for Windows and Mac below. Use the toggles on the left to filter open source OCR software by OS, license, language, programming language, and project status.
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Tesseract OCR
Open Source OCR Engine
Tesseract is an open source OCR or optical character recognition engine and command line program. OCR is a technology that allows for the recognition of text characters within a digital image. With the latest version of Tesseract, there is a greater focus on line recognition, however it still supports the legacy Tesseract OCR engine which recognizes character patterns. Tesseract can recognize over 100 languages out-of-the-box, and can be trained to recognize other languages. It supports various output formats, including plain text, HTML, PDF and more. It also has unicode (UTF-8) support. -
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NAPS2 - Not Another PDF Scanner
Scan documents to PDF and other file types, as simply as possible.
Visit NAPS2's home page at www.naps2.com. NAPS2 is a document scanning application with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Scan your documents from WIA- and TWAIN-compatible scanners, organize the pages as you like, and save them as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and other file formats. Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. NAPS2 is currently available in over 40 different languages. Want to see NAPS2 in your preferred language? Help translate! See the wiki for more details. -
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OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files
OCRmyPDF adds an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched. PDF is the best format for storing and exchanging scanned documents. Unfortunately, PDFs can be difficult to modify. OCRmyPDF makes it easy to apply image processing and OCR (recognized, searchable text) to existing PDFs. -
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OpenKM Document Management - DMS
Document Management System and Content Management System
OpenKM Community Edition is a free Document Management System (DMS) that helps businesses control the production, storage, management and distribution of electronic documents, boosting effectiveness and productivity. It integrates document management, collaboration and advanced search into one easy-to-use solution, including administration tools for user roles, access control, security levels, activity logs and automation setup. With OpenKM Community Edition you can: Collect information from any digital source. Collaborate with colleagues on documents and projects. Capitalize on accumulated knowledge by locating documents and information sources. Control business processes with an embedded workflow engine. Automate tasks. For a complete feature list visit: http://goo.gl/au8cQy -
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tesseract-ocr alternative download
Alternative download for tesseract-ocr project
Alternative download for tesseract-ocr project -
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PaddleOCR
Awesome multilingual OCR toolkits based on PaddlePaddle
PaddleOCR offers exceptional, multilingual, and practical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools that can help users train better models and apply them into practice. Inspired by PaddlePaddle, PaddleOCR is an ultra lightweight OCR system, with multilingual recognition, digit recognition, vertical text recognition, as well as long text recognition. It features a PPOCR series of high-quality pre-trained models, which includes: ultra lightweight ppocr_mobile series models, general ppocr_server series models, and ultra lightweight compression ppocr_mobile_slim series models. PaddleOCR is easy to install and easy to use on Windows, Linux, MacOS and other systems. -
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Umi-OCR
OCR software, free and offline
Umi-OCR is a free and open-source optical character recognition (OCR) tool designed to provide fast, offline text extraction from images, screenshots, PDFs, and more without requiring a network connection. It includes a highly efficient offline OCR engine with built-in multilingual recognition libraries, so users can extract text across multiple languages with high accuracy directly on their machines. The software supports flexible usage patterns including screenshot capture OCR, batch processing of large sets of images or documents, PDF parsing, QR code detection, and layout-aware paragraph output. Users can interact with Umi-OCR through a graphical interface, command-line options, or HTTP interfaces, making it adaptable to both casual desktop usage and programmatic automation. Because the project is open source, developers can inspect, modify, and extend its capabilities, and plugins allow for different recognition engines or enhanced features. -
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gImageReader
A graphical frontend to tesseract-ocr
gImageReader is a simple Gtk/Qt front-end to tesseract. Features include: - Import PDF documents and images from disk, scanning devices, clipboard and screenshots - Process multiple images and documents in one go - Manual or automatic recognition area definition - Recognize to plain text or to hOCR documents - Recognized text displayed directly next to the image - Post-process the recognized text, including spellchecking - Generate PDF documents from hOCR documents **Note**: This page is only a mirror for the downloads. Development is happening on github at https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader, release binaries are also posted there. -
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Tesseract.js
A pure Javascript Multilingual OCR
Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port of the popular Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract.js' library supports more than 100 languages, automatic text orientation and script detection, a simple interface for reading paragraph, word, and character bounding boxes. Tesseract.js can run either in a browser and on a server with NodeJS. Tesseract.js is a javascript library that gets words in almost any spoken language out of images. The main Tesseract.js functions (ex. recognize, detect) take an image parameter, which should be something that is like an image. What's considered "image-like" differs depending on whether it is being run from the browser or through NodeJS. -
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openalpr
Automatic license plate recognition library
Deploy license plate and vehicle recognition with Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions designed to provide invaluable vehicle intelligence which enhances business capabilities, automates tasks, and increases overall community safety! Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to greatly surpass legacy OCR solutions. Now, in real-time, users can receive a vehicle's plate number, make, model, color, and direction of travel. Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions allows law enforcement and homeowners to protect their communities, while businesses can boost customer loyalty by receiving alerts the moment a plate of interest is detected. Rekor’s OpenALPR suite of solutions is a force multiplier. Rekor Scout™ upgrades nearly any IP, traffic, or security camera to give you an immediate edge, while Rekor CarCheck analyzes vehicle images and returns valuable data for countless business use-cases. -
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Papermerge
Open Source Document Management System for Digital Archives
Papermerge is an open source document management system (DMS) primarily designed for archiving and retrieving your digital documents. Instead of having piles of paper documents all over your desk, office or drawers - you can quickly scan them and configure your scanner to directly upload to Papermerge DMS. Store, organize and index scanned documents in PDF, JPEG and TIFF formats. Instantly find relevant information using full text, tags and metadata-based search. Papermerge is free and open-source software which means that transparency is the core value of our software development. Source code can be reviewed and improved by anyone from anywhere. Papermerge supports multiple users. Each user can be assigned different permissions to perform only a specific kind of action e.g. view only documents from a specific folder. OCR technology is vital part of Papermerge. It extracts text information from scanned documents, PDF, JPEG, TIFF files. -
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DeepSeek-OCR
Contexts Optical Compression
DeepSeek-OCR is an open-source optical character recognition solution built as part of the broader DeepSeek AI vision-language ecosystem. It is designed to extract text from images, PDFs, and scanned documents, and integrates with multimodal capabilities that understand layout, context, and visual elements beyond raw character recognition. The system treats OCR not simply as “read the text” but as “understand what the text is doing in the image”—for example distinguishing captions from body text, interpreting tables, or recognizing handwritten versus printed words. It supports local deployment, enabling organizations concerned about privacy or latency to run the pipeline on-premises rather than send sensitive documents to third-party cloud services. The codebase is written in Python with a focus on modularity: you can swap preprocessing, recognition, and post-processing components as needed for custom workflows. -
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Hathi Download Helper
Download books from the hathitrust website in a fast and easy manner
2025-05-08 ====================== PLEASE NOTE ======================= Due to changes to the API of the hathirtust homepage, the HDH is no longer functional!! Please check the project Wiki for alternative methods. https://sourceforge.net/p/hathidownloadhelper/alternative/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hathi Download Helper was a tool for downloading public domain books from hathitrust.org. E-Mail contact: hathidownloadhelper@hotmail.com -
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GLM-OCR
Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive
GLM-OCR is an open-source multimodal optical character recognition (OCR) model built on a GLM-V encoder–decoder foundation that brings robust, accurate document understanding to complex real-world layouts and modalities. Designed to handle text recognition, table parsing, formula extraction, and general information retrieval from documents containing mixed content, GLM-OCR excels across major benchmarks while remaining highly efficient with a relatively compact parameter size (~0.9B), enabling deployment in high-concurrency services and edge environments. The model’s multimodal capabilities allow it to reason across image and text content holistically, capturing structured and unstructured information from pages that include dense tables, seals, code snippets, and varied document graphics. GLM-OCR integrates a comprehensive SDK and inference toolchain that makes it easy for developers to install, invoke, and embed into production pipelines with simple commands or APIs. -
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MinerU
A high-quality tool for convert PDF to Markdown and JSON
MinerU is an open-source, high-quality document extraction toolkit focused on converting PDFs (and other document formats) into structured Markdown and JSON. It leverages OCR and layout analysis to preserve semantic structure and metadata, ideal for research and data science workflows. -
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Timeline based editor for creating Compact Disc Subcode Graphics (also known as CD+G or CDG). Both karaoke and multimedia styles of content are supported. Please visit cdgmagic.sf.net for examples playable directly in the HTML5 CD+G player. CD+Graphics Scribe utility (separate download -- click "Browse All Files" above) can now convert existing CDG karaoke content to CMP (CD+Graphics Magic Project), LRC (Enhanced Lyrics), and ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) format.
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DeepSeek-OCR 2
Visual Causal Flow
DeepSeek-OCR-2 is the second-generation optical character recognition system developed to improve document understanding by introducing a “visual causal flow” mechanism, enabling the encoder to reorder visual tokens in a way that better reflects semantic structure rather than strict raster scan order. It is designed to handle complex layouts and noisy documents by giving the model causal reasoning capabilities that mimic human visual scanning behavior, enhancing OCR performance on documents with rich spatial structure. The repository provides model code and inference scripts that let researchers and developers run and benchmark the system on both images and PDFs, with support for batch evaluation and optimized pipelines leveraging vLLM and transformers. -
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dots.ocr
Multilingual Document Layout Parsing in a Single Vision-Language Model
dots.ocr is a cutting-edge multilingual document parsing system built on a unified vision-language model that combines layout detection, text recognition, and structural understanding into a single architecture. Unlike traditional OCR pipelines that rely on multiple specialized components, dots.ocr integrates these processes end-to-end, reducing error propagation and improving consistency across tasks. The model is designed to recognize virtually any human script, making it highly effective for global and low-resource language scenarios. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on document parsing benchmarks while maintaining a relatively compact model size, demonstrating efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Beyond standard OCR tasks, it extends its capabilities to parse complex visual elements such as charts, diagrams, and web interfaces, converting them into structured outputs like SVG code. -
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chessPDFBrowser
Chess application whichs allows working with chess PDF books and PGNs.
Chess application which allows working with PDFs and PGNs. You can work with the chess games of the PDF and edit their tree of variants. Graphical environment. Standard PGN TAGs. PGN comments. Ocr like (Fen string detection from chess board position images). Connection to Uci chess engines (like stockfish). Position analysis, full game analysis. You can now play games against uci engines. pdf2pgn command line command included. Detailed documentation. Multilanguage currently support for English, Spanish and Catalan. Dark mode option. JDK-17 compatibility -
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Paper2GUI
Convert AI papers to GUI
Convert AI papers to GUI，Make it easy and convenient for everyone to use artificial intelligence technology。让每个人都简单方便的使用前沿人工智能技术 Paper2GUI: An AI desktop APP toolbox for ordinary people. It can be used immediately without installation. It already supports 40+ AI models, covering AI painting, speech synthesis, video frame complementing, video super-resolution, object detection, and image stylization. , OCR recognition and other fields. Support Windows, Mac, Linux systems. Paper2GUI: 一款面向普通人的 AI 桌面 APP 工具箱，免安装即开即用，已支持 40+AI 模型，内容涵盖 AI 绘画、语音合成、视频补帧、视频超分、目标检测、图片风格化、OCR 识别等领域。支持 Windows、Mac、Linux 系统。 -
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Scribe.js
JavaScript OCR and text extraction for images and PDFs
Scribe.js is a JavaScript library that provides Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and text extraction capabilities for both images and PDF documents, aimed at developers who want to build OCR features directly into their applications. The library can take image files (such as PNG or JPEG) and recognize the text they contain, and it can also extract text from PDF files that either already contain text or are image-based scans, using modern web standards and WebAssembly under the hood. In addition to simple text extraction, Scribe.js supports writing or injecting a high-quality invisible text layer back into PDFs, effectively making them searchable and improving usability for indexing or accessibility. It is written in modern ECMAScript Modules (ESM), so it can be imported in both browser and Node.js environments without a build step, though browser usage requires same-origin hosting of the files. -
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qiji-font
Typeface from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books
Typeface from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books. A Ming typeface. Extracted from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books (凌閔刻本). Using semi-automatic computer vision and OCR. Open-source. A work in progress. Named in honor of 閔齊伋, a 16th-century printer. Intended to be used with Kenyan-lang, the Classical Chinese programming language. Download high-resolution PDFs and split pages into images. Manually lay a grid on top of each page to generate bounding boxes for characters (potentially replaceable by an automatic corner-detection algorithm). Generate a low-poly mask for each character on the grid, and save the thumbnails (using OpenCV). First, red channel is subtracted from the grayscale, in order to clean the annotations printed in red ink. Next, the image is thresholded and fed into the contour-tracing algorithm. A metric is then used to discard shapes that are unlikely to be part of the character in interest. -
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Java OCR is a suite of pure java libraries for image processing and character recognition. Small memory footprint and lack of external dependencies makes it suitable for android development. Provides modular structure for easier deployment
