Simple Text Extractor is a fast, high-performance, and 100% offline desktop OCR application designed for secure and effortless text extraction.
The application comes bundled with its own Tesseract OCR engine, specifically optimized to provide a turnkey experience on Linux without any complex dependencies. Version 1.2 introduces an Industrial-Grade core, capable of processing massive documents (2000+ pages) with maximum stability.
What's New in v1.2: "Secure & High-Performance Edition"
Memory-Optimized Engine: New ThreadPoolExecutor logic specifically tuned for Linux Snap confinement. It avoids memory saturation (OOM) by using smart pointer references, allowing the processing of files over 2300 pages without slowing down your OS.
Multi-Core Acceleration: Intelligent distribution of OCR tasks across your CPU cores (up to 8 simultaneous pages) for industrial-level productivity.
Enhanced Security (CWE-377 & CWE-209)
Atomic File Handling: Secure temporary file creation with restricted permissions (0600).
Log Anonymization: Automatic masking of personal paths and sensitive data in system logs.
Hardened Robustness: Native protection against "Decompression Bombs" (malicious high-pixel images) and command injection.
Expanded Language Pack: Now includes 17+ native languages (French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Greek).
Key Features:
100% Offline & Private: Your documents never leave your computer. Ideal for legal, medical, or fiscal archives.
Professional Archiving: Generate PDF/A files for long-term preservation, keeping the original visual perfectly intact with a searchable text layer.
Batch Processing: Process multiple PDFs or images in one click.
Zero-Freeze UI: Completely asynchronous architecture ensuring the interface remains responsive even during heavy processing.
Metadata Analysis: Instant view of DPI, page count, and PDF/A status before processing.
How to Use:
Add Files: Drag and drop your PDFs or images (PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP) into the window.
Select the OCR Language: choose the language corresponding to your document's text.
Configure: Select your destination folder or enable PDF/A archiving if needed.
Start OCR: Click "Start OCR" and follow the progress via the real-time loading bar.
Access: Click the direct links to open your processed files (automatically suffixed with _ocr).
💡 Tip: Using Wayland? If Drag & Drop doesn't work, please use the "Add Files" button or switch to an X11 session.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: Accessing External Drives (USB / Secondary Drives)
By default, the strict security confinement prevents the app from reading your USB sticks or external hard drives. If your files are stored on removable media, you must grant access by running this command once in your terminal:
COMMAND: sudo snap connect simple-text-extractor:removable-media
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Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.
Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, an app store with an audience of millions.
If you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.
For versions of Ubuntu between 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), as well as Ubuntu flavours that don’t include snap by default, snap can be installed from the Ubuntu Software Centre by searching for snapd.
Alternatively, snapd can be installed from the command line:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd
Either log out and back in again, or restart your system, to ensure snap’s paths are updated correctly.
To install Simple-Text-Extractor, simply use the following command:
sudo snap install simple-text-extractor
Browse and find snaps from the convenience of your desktop using the snap store snap.
Interested to find out more about snaps? Want to publish your own application? Visit snapcraft.io now.