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Monocle

Document and image text extraction

A job queue manager extracting text and metadata from documents and images using Apache Tika and Tesseract OCR.

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  • Docker container
  • Kubernetes Helm chart
  • 5 queue backends
  • 4 object-store backends
  • 7 notification drivers
  • 1 cache engine
  • 4 languages (EN, FR, ES, PT)
  • REST API + OpenAPI 3.0.3
  • Realtime WebSocket channels
  • MCP server for AI agents
Monocle screenshot

Monocle turns scanned documents and photos into searchable text. Extract from PDFs, Office docs, and HTML via Apache Tika. OCR images and scans via Tesseract. Redis job queue, S3 storage, and webhook notifications. Perfect for digital archiving, document scanning services, and building searchable libraries from mixed media.

Monocle
What it does

Key features

Extract text from PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, and more via Apache Tika

OCR text recognition from images and scanned documents via Tesseract

Metadata extraction to JSON

Redis job queue with webhooks

S3 storage for input and output

Monocle
Why it's different

Where it goes beyond the obvious

Document extraction and image OCR unified in one service and pipeline

Tech highlights

  • Tools: Apache Tika, Tesseract
  • Input: PDF, Office, HTML, images, scanned documents
  • Storage: S3/MinIO
  • Queue: Redis with webhooks

Built on

Apache Tika (HTTP service)Tesseract OCRCentrifuge

REST API surface

  • POST /push Enqueue extraction (file or image)
  • GET /results Extraction jobs
  • GET /tasks extract-text-from-file, extract-text-from-image
  • GET /storage/list Browse output .txt/.json
  • GET /storage/download Download extracted text
  • WS /realtime Live progress

Full spec at GET /openapi — Swagger UI at /swagger/

Your infrastructure

Backends you can actually pick from.

This service speaks the backends below natively. Swap with a single environment variable.

Queues

  • Redis
  • RabbitMQ
  • SQS
  • Kafka
  • STOMP

Cache

  • Redis

Object storage

  • S3
  • MinIO
  • Azure Blob
  • Local

Notifications

  • Slack
  • Discord
  • Teams
  • FCM
  • APNs
  • SNS
  • WebPush
Where it fits

Use cases

Digital archiving converting physical documents to searchable text

Legal platforms extracting text from contracts and evidence

Libraries digitising mixed-media collections

E-discovery platforms processing document batches

Accessibility services converting images to text

vs Cloud document extraction and OCR

Monocle vs AWS Textract, Azure Document Intelligence, Google Cloud Document AI

Text extraction and OCR without Azure Document Intelligence fees

Compare head-to-head
Patterns

Architecture patterns featuring this service

Process media at scale without renting it

Convert, optimise, and distribute images, audio, video, documents, and ebooks — on your own infrastructure, at SaaS cost minus the SaaS.
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Ready when you are

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One Docker image. One compose stack. One afternoon to production. Monocle is waiting.

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