OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#12Also available natively to the OS (Windows) with PowerToys, if you want an alternative to a browser extension. One of the unsung heroes of that library. Jury is still out on which is more trustworthy handling any personal data, Microsoft or Google. Neither.
And Plasma Spectacle does it too
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#13Half the context I want to give a model is locked inside something I can't select from: a scanned book, a slide deck, a course viewer, a "PDF" that's really page images. Copy-paste gets you nothing, and screenshotting 200 pages by hand isn't a plan. OCR It is a Chrome extension for that gap. You drag out a capture region once — the text block of the reader, say. After that, one hotkey per page screenshots that exact…
Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#14Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
it can also auto paginate for you, no need to keep hitting the hotkey every page. It can paginate by hotkey, xy point on screen or selector.
But only you and your fingers (or voice!) can address that other glaring point that killed your other comments to the point only those of us with showdead in our settings will see them :) OK yeah seemed tedious so figured that must’ve not been the only way [probably if you handwrite you could clear that up beforehand]
What other glaring point? I'm confused.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
But only you and your fingers (or voice!) can address that other glaring point that killed your other comments to the point only those of us with showdead in our settings will see them :) OK yeah seemed tedious so figured that must’ve not been the only way [probably if you handwrite you could clear that up beforehand]
What other glaring point? I'm confused.
>HN isn’t a fan of the generated readmes though
& the comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415857 actually violated the guideline as noted by another here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417725
Note since I last posted: looks like someone vouched for the comment posted by the account created at the same time as OP’s post, so no longer dead
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#17Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#18Does anyone have suggestions on how I could OCR lots of handwritten math notes with diagrams? I have tons of PDFs waiting for me to manually type them myself and can't justify dedicating weeks to do it.
you could try using a local vision model, like Mage-VL from microsoft. Its only a 5b model so its quite small for the capability it has.
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#19Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
There's EasyOCR and RapidOCR too, I guess benchmark and see what's best for your material? Oh and Multimodal LLMs :)
Re: OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
#20“Pin a region once. Hit a hotkey on every page. Get the whole book as text.” Much better than the old definition of “region lock”, nice. HN isn’t a fan of the generated readmes though, though vibed software (thoroughly used) can be all good.
> though vibed software (thoroughly used) can be all good.
Yes, but the problem with these vibe-coded crap is that they are pretty much always less than a week old, which means it wasn't even used before the “author” submitted it here.
(The author didn't even bother writing their comment themselves by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415857)