OCR It: Turn un-copyable documents into text for your LLM
OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
OCR It is a Chrome extension that extracts text from paginated documents trapped in viewers—scanned books, slide decks, PDFs—where selecting text is impossible. Pin a screen region once, then press a hotkey on each page to capture, OCR, and append text to a running transcript. Or start an auto-run that captures, turns the page, and repeats until the document ends. OCR runs 100% offline via a bundled Tesseract build, with no API keys, no network, and no images leaving your machine. It even handles cross-origin iframes and Shadow DOM for page turning, and exports clean text ready for LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.
No API key, no network, no images leaving your machine — the extension makes no outbound requests at all.
- thiagolima
I added Firefox support. 0.3.0 builds for both browsers from the same source, and it's submitted for both google/chrome and mozilla/firefox, i am waiting on reviews now, which usually takes a few days.
Until it's approved you guys can download the ready to use releases:
Download ocr-it-firefox-0.3.0.zip from https://github.com/thiagotigaz/ocr-it/releases/tag/v0.3.0
If you'd rather build from source, the steps are in the README: https://github.com/thiagotigaz/ocr-it#install
- andreashaerter
If you use a Linux desktop (I am on Fedora), Gradia[1][2] is definitely worth a look as well.
It has a similar workflow for taking screenshots and then immediately annotating or editing them, without having to open a separate image editor. And: it provides also an local OCR feature (which is why I comment this here), you can extract text from a screenshot with on-screen OCR using Tesseract with the small button beside the "Crop Image" one.
Combined with the syntax-highlighting feature for screenshots of code snippets, the OCR is surprisingly useful in combination if you e.g. quickly discuss some code in a chat when copy is blocked for whatever reason (e.g. somone sent you a screenshot in the first place).
[1] https://gradia.alexandervanhee.be/
[2] https://flathub.org/en/apps/be.alexandervanhee.gradia
Edit: fixed wrong link index numbers
- rickcarlino
Is Tesseract still the best choice for local OCR in 2026? I was always underwhelmed with its real-world performance.
- tobinfekkes
Also 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.
- Barbing
“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.