// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
Pin a region once. Hit a hotkey on every page. Get the whole book as text.
A Chrome extension for reading a paginated document trapped in a viewer — a
scanned book, a slide deck, a PDF, a reader that won't let you select text.
You drag out the capture region once. After that every press of the hotkey
screenshots that exact rectangle, OCRs it, and appends the text to a running
transcript. Or hand the whole job over: ⌥⇧A starts a run that
captures, turns the page, and repeats until the document ends.
Then paste the result wherever it's useful — an LLM being the obvious one, since
a few hundred pages you couldn't select are now a text file you can hand to
Claude or ChatGPT to summarise, search or ask questions about.
OCR runs locally with a bundled Tesseract build. No API key, no network, no
images leaving your machine — the extension makes no outbound requests at all.
Everything needed is committed. There's no build step: npm install is only for
running the tests or re-vendoring Tesseract.
Then check chrome://extensions/shortcuts and confirm the hotkeys landed —
Chrome silently leaves them blank when something else already claims them.
It asks for no site access at install. Single captures ride on activeTab,
which Chrome hands over when you press the hotkey or open the popup. Two things
need a durable grant — an auto-run that outlives a page load, and turning pages
inside a cross-origin iframe — and the popup offers an Allow button for
the site you're on when it matters.
⌥⇧R, then drag a box over the text. Before saving you can drag it
around, pull the handles, or nudge it a pixel at a time with the arrow keys
(hold ⇧ to resize). Enter keeps it.
Draw a little inside the text margins — everything in the rectangle gets read,
page numbers and running headers included.