Show HN: MakeACopy – An offline, open-source document scanner for Android

4 points

8 months ago

After building Let’s Bend, a small open-source harmonica training app that surprisingly reached #1 on HN, I wanted to create something completely different - a document scanner that works fully offline.

MakeACopy is an open-source document scanner app for Android that runs entirely on-device. No accounts, no ads, no tracking, no cloud - just local processing.

It uses OpenCV + ONNX for document detection and Tesseract for OCR, then exports PDFs with an embedded searchable text layer (or plain text).

Main features:

– Detect and crop documents using OpenCV/ONNX

– Local OCR via Tesseract (no servers)

– Export as searchable PDF or plain text

– 100 % offline, privacy-friendly, open source (Apache 2.0)

Compared to apps like Adobe Scan or Microsoft Lens, MakeACopy doesn’t require an account and avoids any cloud upload.

GitHub: https://github.com/egdels/makeacopy

Website: https://egdels.github.io/makeacopy/

Happy to get feedback, questions, or feature suggestions from the community.

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