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TrulyFreeOCR
Business-friendly Self-contained OCR with MRC compression
TrulyFreeOCR is a self-contained Java CLI that turns scanned PDFs and images into searchable, compressed PDF documents. It applies MRC compression (PNG background + JBIG2/G4 foreground) to reduce file size while preserving readability — no Ghostscript, no Python runtime, no cloud APIs needed. A single fat JAR + bundled Tesseract is all you need. Apache 2.0 licensed for worry-free commercial use.
I built TrulyFreeOCR because every existing OCR solution had a catch:
Tesseract needs system packages, cloud APIs need internet, PaddleOCR needs Python.
This project packages everything you need into a single `bootstrap.sh`:
- OpenJDK + Gradle + ONNX Runtime (all bundled)
- PP-OCRv6 ONNX models (detection + recognition)
- JBIG2 compression for small output PDFs
- Zero network calls during OCR — runs fully offline
I ran a detailed comparison on 10 pages of Sherlock Holmes:
- Tesseract: 0.919 precision / 0.958 recall / 0.938 F1
- PaddleOCR (v6 medium): 0.929 precision / 0.746 recall / 0.828 F1
On handwriting, PaddleOCR detects text where Tesseract sees nothing
(40 words vs 0 on a 1893 handwriting sample).
It also supports --ocr-engine tesseract|paddle and --language en (v5 English model).
Test it on your own scans and let me know what you find.
The whole thing is at github.com/msmarkgu/TrulyFreeOCR
the single fat jar with tesseract bundled is a nice touch, dropped it on a stack of old scanned contracts and the search worked right away. file size dropped more than i expected with the mrc compression too.
About TrulyFreeOCR on Product Hunt
“Business-friendly Self-contained OCR with MRC compression”
TrulyFreeOCR was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 6 upvotes and 2 comments, placing #113 on the daily leaderboard. TrulyFreeOCR is a self-contained Java CLI that turns scanned PDFs and images into searchable, compressed PDF documents. It applies MRC compression (PNG background + JBIG2/G4 foreground) to reduce file size while preserving readability — no Ghostscript, no Python runtime, no cloud APIs needed. A single fat JAR + bundled Tesseract is all you need. Apache 2.0 licensed for worry-free commercial use.
TrulyFreeOCR was featured in Productivity (656.7k followers), Open Source (68.6k followers), Developer Tools (516.2k followers) and GitHub (41.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 264k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted TrulyFreeOCR?
TrulyFreeOCR was hunted by Mark Front. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Mark Front