🔎 Textract
Every scan, every screenshot, into text. Offline. Once.
Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $19.99/month for bundled OCR. ABBYY FineReader wants $99/year. Online OCR sites make you upload your contracts, IDs and scans to a server you don't control. Textract does the same job locally, offline, with zero telemetry, for a one-time $19.
Textract screenshot is being captured — the app is shipped and real.
Features
Drag-drop OCR
Drop images (PNG/JPG/WEBP/BMP/TIFF) or PDFs, get per-page extracted text — PDFs are rasterized page-by-page automatically.
Per-page results
Page thumbnails, text pane, per-page copy and copy-all, confidence indicator, .txt export.
Searchable-PDF export
Rebuilds the PDF with an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — Ctrl-F-able and copy-able in any PDF reader.
Batch folder mode
Point it at a folder (recursive optional), OCR everything, get a .txt per file and a summary of files/pages/words/failures.
Screenshot-to-text hotkey
Global Ctrl+Shift+T opens a region-capture overlay even while minimized to tray — DPI-aware across multi-monitor setups, auto-copies to clipboard.
Multi-language OCR
English is bundled; other languages download on demand with a progress UI — the only network call the app ever makes.
Preprocessing
Optional grayscale + adaptive threshold pass to rescue low-contrast scans.
Local history
Recent extractions persisted locally — re-copy without re-OCR, clearable any time.
Textract vs Adobe Acrobat Pro
Adobe Acrobat Pro at $19.99/mo runs roughly $240/year — $480 over two years. Textract is $19, once.
| Textract | Adobe Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $19.99/month ($240/yr, forever) |
| Your documents | Never leave your machine | Uploaded for cloud OCR features |
| Works fully offline | Yes | Partial |
| Searchable PDF export | Yes | Yes |
| Batch folder OCR | Yes | Limited |
| Screenshot-to-text hotkey | Yes | No |
| Telemetry | None | Extensive |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
One month of Acrobat Pro costs more than Textract, forever. Everything after month one is money you keep.
Three steps, no subscription
Buy once on Whop
One-time $19 for the packaged Windows installer — English OCR bundled, tray icon and hotkey ready out of the box.
Drop in scans or hit the hotkey
Drag images or PDFs into the app, or press Ctrl+Shift+T from anywhere to snap a screen region straight to clipboard text.
Export what you need
Copy text per page, save .txt files, batch a whole folder, or export a true searchable PDF you can Ctrl-F in any reader.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/textract-ocr, always. $19 buys the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates instead of npm i && npm start.
How accurate is the OCR?
It's Tesseract's accuracy — excellent on clean scans, screenshots and printed documents, mediocre on handwriting or heavily skewed photos. It's not a cloud vision model, and we're not claiming it is. For sensitive paperwork the trade-off is worth it: nothing gets uploaded.
Is the searchable PDF real or a gimmick?
Real. Each page is rebuilt as the original image plus an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — and the test suite round-trips the output through a PDF parser to prove the text layer extracts correctly, not just eyeballs it in a reader.
Does it replace Acrobat Pro?
For OCR, yes. But Acrobat is a full PDF editor — forms, signatures, redaction, page editing. Textract does one job (getting text out of images and scans, offline) and does it for the price of one month of Acrobat.
Does it ever connect to the internet?
Only if you download an additional OCR language, which is clearly surfaced with a progress UI. The OCR engine runs from bundled local files — never a CDN — and there's no telemetry, no uploads, no account.
Own Textract forever
$19 once. Signed installer, 1-click setup, updates included. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.