simonw / simonw/tools

Version of OCR that can run entirely offline

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#2 5 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
HTML
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Currently https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr loads assets from a CDN.

A version that can run offline would be fantastic. It would be a tiny bit tricky to get versions of PDF.js and Tesseract.js (and their supporting files) that work like that, but it should absolutely be possible.

Ideally offer this as a zip file for people to download and run locally.

Could it be done such that it works from opening a HTML file in a browser, rather than needing a localhost web server? I don't think that works right now, but it may be possible with a bit more thought or some weird bundler magic.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by inspecting the OCR tool at https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr and its PDF.js and Tesseract.js dependencies. Determine how to package those supporting files in a downloadable zip that works without a CDN, then verify whether the extracted HTML opens and performs OCR directly from a browser without localhost.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
frontend, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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