Using a Self-Hosted PDF OCR API with PaddleOCR

The problem If you need to extract text from PDFs - especially large ones with 100+ pages - and don't want to pay for cloud OCR services or use LLM APIs on it, PaddleOCR can handle it locally on your own GPU. paddleocr-pdf-api is an open-source Docker image that wraps PaddleOCR's vision-language model into a REST API. It runs on your GPU and lets you fetch results page-by-page as they're processed, without waiting for the entire document to finish. When this is useful Processing large volumes of PDFs - submit documents via API and process them one by one through a job queue Sensitive documents that can't leave your network - everything runs locally, no external API calls Large documents (100+ pages) - results stream page-by-page, so you can start consuming output before the full document is done Integrating OCR into a pipeline - simple REST API that any language/tool can call Less common languages - handles languages that many OCR tools struggle with What's under the hood Model: Paddle