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

Introduction

I'm the author of TrulyFreeOCR, an open-source OCR pipeline that turns scanned PDFs into searchable, highly-compressed PDFs. Everything is Apache 2.0 / MIT / BSD — no GPL, no AGPL, no proprietary model weights.

Why I built it:

I needed an OCR pipeline for a document processing system where:

Every dependency had to be business-friendly (no GPL/AGPL)