ndl-lab/ndlocr-lite

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1309 stars · 86 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

NDLOCR-Lite is a lightweight Japanese OCR application developed by the National Diet Library that converts digitized images of books and magazines into text. It runs on ordinary consumer computers without requiring a GPU, and is available both as a desktop GUI application and a Python command-line tool.

Use cases

• extract text from scanned book images
• run OCR on Japanese documents without a GPU
• batch convert a directory of digitized page images to text
• OCR a single image file from the command line
• capture screen regions and convert them to text directly
• output OCR results as JSON or XML
• improve recognition of vertical Japanese text and tate-chu-yoko

When to choose

• you need Japanese OCR on a laptop or desktop without a GPU
• you want a ready-to-use desktop app for Windows, Mac, or Linux
• you need to batch-process digitized library or archive images
• you want both GUI and CLI interfaces for OCR

When to avoid

• you need high-accuracy OCR for non-Japanese languages
• you require GPU-accelerated large-scale OCR pipelines
• your file paths contain full-width Japanese characters when using the desktop app
• you need OCR integrated into a web service

Facets

application · maturity active

ocr image-processing nlp cli gui computer-vision files pdf developer-tools windows python cross-platform cli japanese-ocr text-recognition digitized-documents cpu-only national-diet-library handwriting-recognition batch-processing natural-language-processing macos linux desktop

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ndl-lab/ndlocr-lite")