OCR or HTR software/services with no AI and/or strong privacy protections

[kharchivist]

I’m looking for recommendations for an OCR or HTR software that does not utilize AI or if it does, has strong privacy protections.

[ignoramous]

@kharchivist

if it does, has strong privacy protections

If you’re technically inclined, try running Surya, which was recently incubated by Mozilla Builders in 2024.^[1] I’ve seen folks recommend Mitta OCR, OpenParse, and PDFPlumber, but personally, I’ve not used those.

If you’re okay with an “okay” solution, try Simon Wilson’s Tesseract OCR in Browser.

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1. Disclaimer: A FOSS project I co-develop was also once incubated by Mozilla Builders in 2020, but other than that, no real affiliation with Vik & his startup. ↩︎