TextLens — Obsidian Plugin

An Obsidian plugin that scans the active note for image references and inserts the recognized text directly below each image, using a fully on-device OCR engine (PaddleOCR v6 via ONNX Runtime). No server, no API key, no internet connection required after the one-time runtime setup.

Features

• One command — TextLens: OCR Current Note processes every image in the active file
• Fully local — runs PaddleOCR v6 on-device via ONNX Runtime; your images never leave your machine
• Model tiers — Tiny (~5 MB, fastest), Small (~25 MB, balanced), Medium (~60 MB, most accurate)
• Dual syntax support — handles both Obsidian wikilinks (![[image.png]]) and standard Markdown (![alt](image.png))
• Idempotent — skips images that already have an OCR block below them (toggle-able)
• Re-OCR — running the command again on an already-processed note automatically replaces all existing OCR blocks
• Two output formats — collapsible Obsidian callout or plain fenced code block
• Single undo step — the entire batch edit is one Cmd+Z entry
• Merge wrapped lines — automatically joins soft-wrapped OCR lines into natural prose paragraphs

Requirements

• Obsidian ≥ 1.7.2 (desktop only — Windows, macOS, Linux)
• One-time runtime setup (~40 MB download): Settings → TextLens → Local OCR Engine → Setup

Installation

Community Plugin (recommended)

1. Open Settings → Community Plugins and disable Restricted mode
2. Click Browse, search for TextLens, and install it
3. Enable the plugin, then go to Settings → TextLens → Local OCR Engine and click Setup

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Copy them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/text-lens/
3. Reload Obsidian, enable the plugin, then run Setup from the settings panel

From source

git clone https://github.com/Nexround/obsidian-text-lens.git
cd obsidian-text-lens
npm install
npm run build

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into your vault's plugin directory.

Usage

Open any note that contains images, then open the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+P) and choose:

TextLens: OCR Current Note

The plugin reads all image buffers in parallel, then sends them to the OCR model in a single batch call, and inserts the recognised text immediately below each image.

Callout output (default)

![[screenshot.png]]

> [!note]+ OCR: screenshot.png
> Hello World
> This is recognized text

Code block output

![[screenshot.png]]

​```ocr
Hello World
This is recognized text
​```

Settings

Local OCR Engine

Setting	Default	Description
Setup	—	Download ONNX Runtime native binaries (~40 MB) for your platform
Model tier	Small	tiny / small / medium — trades speed for accuracy. Models are downloaded once and cached at ~/.cache/ppu-paddle-ocr/
Unload / Load engine	—	Manually control the ~200 MB ONNX inference session in memory
Delete runtime files	—	Remove all downloaded native binaries (~40 MB) from the plugin directory
Clear model cache	—	Delete cached model weights from ~/.cache/ppu-paddle-ocr/

Output

Setting	Default	Description
Output format	Callout	> [!note]+ callout or ```ocr fenced block
Skip already-processed	On	Don't re-OCR images that already have a block below them
Merge wrapped lines	On	Join soft-wrapped OCR lines into natural prose; preserves paragraph gaps and list items
Max concurrency	3	Maximum number of images the OCR model processes in parallel during batch inference (1–20)

Diagnostics

Setting	Default	Description
Developer mode	Off	Log each image's raw OCR result to the console (Ctrl+Shift+I)

Development

npm run dev      # watch mode
npm run build    # production build → main.js

Source layout

src/
  main.ts           Plugin entry, commands, settings UI, OCR dispatch
  local-ocr.ts      LocalOcrEngine — wraps ppu-paddle-ocr via CJS bundle
  native-manager.ts Runtime installer — downloads onnxruntime-node & @napi-rs/canvas
scripts/
  build-bundle.mjs  Bundles ppu-paddle-ocr + ppu-ocv + opencv-js → ppu-bundle.cjs
  deploy.mjs        Builds and copies all artifacts to a local vault for testing

Why ppu-bundle.cjs?

Obsidian's Electron renderer loads pages from the app:// protocol. Chromium treats a dynamic import("file://…") as cross-origin and blocks it. build-bundle.mjs pre-bundles ppu-paddle-ocr into a single CJS file so local-ocr.ts can load it with require(), which uses Node.js's CJS resolver and has no protocol restriction.

ppu-bundle.cjs is not committed to the repository. It is built in CI and attached to each GitHub Release as a release asset, then downloaded on-demand by the plugin's Setup flow.

License

MIT