Offline OCR and Document Scanning Tools

dots.ocr is a self-hosted OCR model for developers and teams that need text and page structure from multilingual documents. It combines text recognition and layout parsing in a single vision-language model you can run on your own hardware.

EasyOCR is a Python library for developers adding text recognition to an application. It reads both text in photographs and dense document text.

ExtractThinker is a Python library for developers who want to extract structured data from documents using models running locally through Ollama. It also supports OpenAI, Anthropic and Groq. With a cloud provider, extraction sends document content to that service, requires provider credentials and may incur charges.

Whispering Tiger creates live transcripts and translations from audio on your computer for VRChat conversations and streaming captions. It can also read text in game images, so spoken dialogue and visible text can feed into the same translation workflow.

Paperless-GPT adds AI document processing to an existing paperless-ngx archive. It's for people who want to reduce manual sorting and extract text from scanned paperwork.

Roboflow Inference runs computer vision models on images and camera feeds for teams building inspection, monitoring and image analysis systems. You can host it on your own computer, server or edge device.

Lethe is a local document de-identification app for people who work with confidential contracts, client records or deal documents and want to use AI without sharing the names involved. It replaces names with consistent placeholders, then restores them in AI-generated replies, including summaries and translations.

UGTLive translates text on your Windows screen for games, manga reading and language study. It places translations over the app you're viewing and requires an NVIDIA RTX 20, 30, 40 or 50 series GPU with at least 8 GB VRAM.

PDF Editor Offline helps people edit and prepare sensitive documents on their own computer. It works offline without an account, and desktop and source modes process documents on the device without uploads or document telemetry.

Chandra OCR converts document images and PDFs into text that retains page structure. It's for people processing scans, handwritten records or documents whose tables and forms need to survive extraction.

Unstructured is a document processing library for developers preparing files for LLM applications. It turns text documents and images into structured output that applications can work with.

Raycast Ollama is a desktop launcher extension for people who want to chat with models and work on text without leaving Raycast. It connects to Ollama running on your machine or a remote server you choose.

TrailSnap is a self-hosted AI photo album for people and families who want to organize their pictures and retrace past trips. It connects photos with places and travel records so you can find a particular memory or review a whole journey.

File Brain is a desktop search app for people who remember a document's subject but can't recall its name or location. You can describe what you're looking for and search the contents of files on your computer.

SnapOtter is a self-hosted application for people and teams who need to edit or convert private files without uploading them to an online processing service. It combines media, document and local AI tools in a browser interface.

Dr Doc Search is a self-hosted Python application for asking questions about PDF books and documents. It's for readers who want answers drawn from a particular text and a choice between OpenAI and HuggingFace models. The code is open source under the MIT license.

DeskTranslate translates text visible in games, videos, menus and images for people who want to read it without switching applications. It can translate a single selection or follow changing dialogue in a chosen screen region.

Qwen2.5-VL is a vision-language model for developers building visual assistants, document processing applications and screen-based agents. It answers questions about images and video and can return structured data for software to use.

Omit Redact is beta software for offline PII redaction on Windows 10 and 11, built for people preparing sensitive files to share in legal, healthcare, financial and public sector work. Local language models detect names, organisations and places in seven languages, alongside pattern checks for IDs and account numbers. Files and processing stay on your device, with no account, cloud service or telemetry.

Paperwise turns PDFs, scans and records into a searchable library for people managing private documents. It answers questions across files and links its answers to the source pages so you can check the evidence.

Lingolay is a free, open source screen translator for people who want translated subtitles while playing games or watching videos. It reads visible text with OCR, translates it on your computer and displays the result in a floating overlay. Optional Piper voices read the translations aloud.

PDFMathTranslate translates scientific papers for readers who need the text in another language while keeping equations and figures in context. It produces translated and bilingual PDFs so readers can compare the result with the original.

Paperless-ngx is a document management system for people who want a searchable archive of their scanned paperwork. It helps keep records such as invoices and tax documents available without searching through paper folders.

Interpreter translates Japanese game text into English subtitles over the game window. It's aimed at retro-game players, with MeikiOCR tuned for Japanese game text and pixel fonts. The default MeikiOCR and Sugoi V4 models run locally without internet access after setup.

PaddleX is a low-code toolkit for developers building AI applications with PaddlePaddle models. It brings pretrained pipelines and model training into one tool for applications that process documents, images or time-series data.

Tesseract is an OCR engine for developers and document-processing workflows that need to extract text from images. It includes a command-line tool and an embeddable library, but doesn't include a graphical app.

Stirling PDF is a PDF workspace for editing individual documents and automating larger document workflows. It runs through a browser on your own server, with Docker deployment, or as a desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux.

HilbertRaum is a local AI workspace for people working with confidential documents, research, or personal archives. It lets you use AI without sending your files or conversations to an external service.

Surya is a local OCR toolkit for developers who need text and page structure from document images. It handles multilingual documents and preserves reading order for use in document-processing applications.