TrulyFreeOCR – a Java OCR pipeline in a single fat JAR, zero native deps required

Short summary

TrulyFreeOCR is an open-source Java OCR pipeline that turns scanned PDFs into searchable, highly-compressed PDFs with zero native dependencies. It bundles Tesseract, Leptonica, and jbig2enc into a single fat JAR with Apache 2.0/MIT/BSD licensing, runs fully offline on CPU, and achieves 5-10x file size reduction via MRC compression. The author built it after surveying 20+ tools and finding none that met all enterprise requirements.

• •Single fat JAR with no GPL/AGPL dependencies, runs offline on CPU with no admin rights
• •MRC compression achieves 5-10x file size reduction vs JPEG-only output
• •Tesseract-based accuracy — good for clean scans but not SOTA for noisy or photographed documents

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.