OCR It

Pin a region once. Hit a hotkey on every page. Get the whole book as text.

A Chrome and Firefox 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.

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Install

Install from your browser's store — one click, and it updates itself:

After installing on Chrome, check chrome://extensions/shortcuts: Chrome silently leaves a hotkey blank when something else already claims it. Firefox has no navigable shortcut editor, so the popup's hotkey buttons point you at about:addons → gear icon → Manage Extension Shortcuts instead.

To build it yourself instead — one source tree, two targets. npm run build writes a loadable directory per browser into build/:

git clone https://github.com/thiagotigaz/ocr-it.git
cd ocr-it
npm run build          # -> build/chrome, build/firefox

Chrome (116+)

1. Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode
2. Load unpacked → select build/chrome (or the repo root — it is a valid Chrome extension as checked in, so no build step is strictly needed)
3. Pin the extension — the toolbar icon doubles as the page counter

Firefox (140+)

1. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
2. Load Temporary Add-on… → pick build/firefox/manifest.json
3. Pin the extension from the toolbar's overflow menu

Or, with Mozilla's tooling, npm run start:firefox launches a scratch profile with the extension already installed and reloads it on every edit.

A temporary add-on is unloaded when Firefox quits — only Mozilla-signed add-ons install permanently, which is what the store listing above is for. This route is for working on the code.

Everything needed is committed — npm install is only for the tests, the Firefox linter, or re-vendoring Tesseract.

It asks for no site access at install. Single captures ride on activeTab, which the browser 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. Firefox exposes the same grant under about:addons → OCR It → Permissions.

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Using it

1. Pin the region

⌥⇧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.

2. Capture

Press ⌥⇧S once per page. The screenshot is taken immediately and OCR runs in the background, so you never wait between pages — captures queue up and the badge counts what's still being read.

3. Or let it run

Set up a next-page control (below) and ⌥⇧A takes over completely: capture, turn, capture, turn, until the document ends. Esc on the page stops it.

4. Export

Every page is listed with a thumbnail of exactly what was cropped, so a drifted region is obvious at a glance instead of eighty pages later. Text is editable in place; a bad read can be re-run on its own.

Copy all and Download .txt emit the pages in order with --- page N --- separators.

A page marked DUPLICATE had text identical to the one before it — nearly always because the document didn't actually turn.

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Turning pages for you

Enable Turn the page automatically after capture, then:

• Click a control — hit Pick control and click the viewer's next-page button. What gets stored is a point, not a CSS selector.
• Press a key — dispatches a keyboard event (default ArrowRight) into whichever frame owns the middle of your capture region, so the reader gets it rather than the host page.

Test now fires an advance immediately, without capturing, and reports what happened — worth using before starting a long run.

Why a point rather than a selector

A stored point survives the DOM re-renders that routinely invalidate a CSS selector, and it reaches two places a selector cannot:

• Cross-origin iframes. Most embedded readers are iframes, and nothing the top frame can express addresses an element inside one.
• Shadow DOM. document.querySelector can't see into a shadow root.

At advance time the point is offered to every frame and the one that actually owns it acts. A frame works out where it sits inside the top-level viewport by walking up its same-origin ancestors; across an origin boundary the parent hands the offset down by postMessage. (window.screenX is no help — inside an iframe it reports the browser window, not the frame.) The owning frame resolves the point through any shadow roots, walks up to the nearest real control, and emits the full pointerdown → mousedown → pointerup → mouseup → click sequence, so viewers that page on pointerdown behave like those listening for click.

When it doesn't turn

Every attempt records a verdict, shown in the popup and as an on-page toast:

Because the target is a fixed point on screen, resizing the window or changing zoom mid-run breaks it, exactly as it breaks the capture region.

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Hands-off runs

⌥⇧A — or Start auto-run — captures, turns, and repeats on its own.

Each cycle waits for that page's OCR to come back before turning. That costs nothing in practice (OCR is faster than a page turn) and buys the one thing an unattended loop needs: reliable end-detection. A run that only fired screenshots on a timer would sail past the last page and fill the transcript with copies of it.

Stop it with Esc on the page, the hotkey, or the popup. It also stops itself when:

Whatever ended it is reported in the popup, so a run you walked away from never just stops being mysterious. A run refuses to start without a working next-page control rather than spinning on one page.

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PDFs

Chrome's built-in PDF viewer works — text comes straight out of it. Draw the region over the page area (not the thumbnail sidebar) and page with your own ↓ / PageDown.

Auto-advance does not work inside the PDF viewer, in either mode: the viewer is a plugin no extension can inject into, so a click lands on the <embed>, and its paging is native scrolling that synthetic key events can't drive. Since you're already pressing a hotkey per page, pressing your own page-down key costs nothing.

For a PDF on disk (file:///…), open chrome://extensions → Details on OCR It → enable Allow access to file URLs. Chrome withholds file:// from every extension until you do.

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Settings

Leave Layout on Auto

Auto runs Tesseract's layout analysis, which finds columns on its own and returns them in reading order. The other modes skip that step, and on anything but a single block of text they fail in the worst possible way — silently.

Point Single block at a two-column page and the two columns come back interleaved line by line, alternating between them, into text that means nothing. It still reports ~95% confidence while doing it. Measured on a two-column crop, that is 52.9% character error against 0.0% on Auto — the benchmark has the table.

The mode names invite the mistake: a book page is one column of body text, so Single column and Single block sound like the careful choice. They aren't. Reach for them only when the region genuinely holds one uninterrupted block and Auto is mis-segmenting it — a caption, a single line, a code snippet.

For a layout Auto cannot handle — a figure straddling the gutter, a two-page spread — capture each column as its own region instead. Two captures per page reads perfectly; one wrong Layout setting does not.

Adding a language

Three ship with the extension — English, Portuguese and Spanish. Any of Tesseract's other ~100 languages can be added, but nothing is fetched at runtime, so the model has to be vendored into the extension first.

npm install                    # once, for the tooling
npm run vendor -- fra deu jpn  # any tesseract language codes

That pulls each <code>.traineddata.gz into vendor/lang/. Then add the codes to LANGUAGES in src/shared.js so they appear in the popup's dropdown:

export const LANGUAGES = [
  { code: 'eng', label: 'English' },
  { code: 'por', label: 'Portuguese' },
  { code: 'spa', label: 'Spanish' },
  { code: 'fra', label: 'French' },       // added
];

Reload the extension at chrome://extensions and the new entry is there.

Codes are the three-letter ones Tesseract uses: fra French, deu German, ita Italian, nld Dutch, rus Russian, jpn Japanese, chi_sim simplified Chinese, ara Arabic. The full list lives in the tessdata repository.

Two languages at once work as well — give a code of eng+por and Tesseract loads both models into one worker, reading a page that mixes them:

{ code: 'eng+por', label: 'English + Portuguese' },

It costs a little speed and a little accuracy, so prefer a single language when the document only has one.

Size. Each language adds roughly 0.7–3 MB to the extension — English is the biggest at 2.9 MB, French one of the smallest at 0.7 MB. The models come from @tesseract.js-data/<code>/4.0.0_best_int: the "best" models quantised to integers, meaningfully more accurate than the fast variants.

To drop a language, delete its .gz from vendor/lang/ and its entry from LANGUAGES.

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How it works

Cropping needs a canvas and Tesseract needs a real Worker. Where those can live is the one place the two browsers genuinely differ, so it is the one place the code forks — src/ocr/host.js, chosen at build time:

• Chrome. An MV3 background is a service worker, which has neither a DOM nor Worker. The engine is parked in an offscreen document and reached by message.
• Firefox. There is no offscreen API and no need for one: an MV3 background is an event page, a real document, so the engine is imported straight into it and called in-process.

run loop ─┐                        (⌥⇧A: capture → turn → repeat)
hotkey ───┴▶ background.js ─▶ hide our own HUD, wait for a paint
                            ─▶ tabs.captureVisibleTab          (whole viewport)
                            ─▶ ocr host: crop to the region, upscale, greyscale
                            ─▶ store the page + thumbnail, turn the page
                            ─▶ queue ─▶ ocr host: Tesseract ─▶ text into storage

Details that matter:

• The region is stored in CSS pixels relative to the viewport. At capture time the screenshot's own width is divided by the live innerWidth, so zoom changes and retina/non-retina differences come out right without trusting a stored DPR.
• The HUD is hidden and given two animation frames to disappear before the screenshot, so the extension's own toast can never end up inside the crop.
• Captures are serialised and OCR runs one job at a time, so mashing the hotkey queues work instead of corrupting the page list.
• Full-size crops are kept only until a page is read successfully, then discarded; the thumbnail stays for verification.
• A run is cancelled by bumping a token the loop re-checks at every await, so stopping lands at a checkpoint rather than mid-write. Storage reads inside the loop double as keep-alive for the background, and a one-minute alarm restarts the loop if it is recycled anyway — both browsers idle it out.
• Everything else is shared verbatim. browser.* is preferred over chrome.* where both exist, because Firefox's chrome alias is callback-style and every await in this codebase would resolve to undefined against it.

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Tests

npm install
npm test            # add -- --headed to watch it
npm run lint:firefox   # Mozilla's add-on validator against build/firefox
npm run shots       # regenerate the screenshots in docs/

The suite installs the unpacked extension into a real headless Chrome over the DevTools protocol, serves fixture documents, and drives the actual product: it drags out a region with synthetic mouse events, fires captures, checks the OCR text against what was rendered, verifies nothing outside the region leaked in, checks the shipped manifest requests no host access and that one toolbar click is enough for a plain capture, exercises duplicate detection, drives auto-advance against three DOM shapes — a plain page, a cross-origin iframe and an open shadow root — confirms a misconfigured auto-advance reports itself instead of failing silently, runs an unattended loop to the end of a finite document and asserts it stopped on its own with every page in order, and checks a run stops dead on request.

Chrome 137+ ignores --load-extension, so the harness installs over CDP with Extensions.loadUnpacked and --enable-unsafe-extension-debugging. Headless Chrome can't show the permission prompt either, so the behaviour tests install a copy of the extension with the grant baked in — the state of a user who clicked Allow — while the permissions section checks the real manifest and proves the ungranted path still works via Extensions.triggerAction, which is a genuine toolbar click.

The behavioural suite drives Chrome only — there is no equivalent CDP harness for Firefox. The two builds share every file that carries logic; what differs between them is one 6-line module and the manifest.

Testing the Firefox build

The same fixture documents the Chrome suite asserts against can be served on their own, so a manual pass is checked against known-good text rather than a "looks about right":

npm run lint:firefox   # Mozilla's validator — the one AMO runs. Zero errors is the bar.
npm run fixture        # serves the test documents, prints the expected OCR output
npm run start:firefox  # scratch profile with the extension loaded, reloads on edit

npm run start:firefox is the fast loop. To use your own profile instead, go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox → Load Temporary Add-on… and pick build/firefox/manifest.json (the packaged zip works there too).

Open the background page's console from that same page — Inspect next to OCR It. A failure to load the engine shows up there and nowhere else.

Worth walking, in this order — each step is something that differs from Chrome:

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Limits

• Browser-internal pages — chrome://, about:, the extension stores, other extensions' pages — are off limits to every extension, including this one.
• Only the visible viewport can be captured — the region has to be on screen.
• Screenshots are rate-limited to a couple per second; captures retry with backoff, so fast mashing just queues.
• Accuracy tracks the source. Crisp rendered text reads at 90 %+ confidence; low-resolution scans and handwriting will need cleanup.
• Local file:/// documents need Allow access to file URLs switched on in Chrome, or the file:// origin granted from the popup in Firefox.
• activeTab does not reach cross-origin iframes. If your reader lives in one, grant the site from the popup before setting up auto-advance.

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Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled Tesseract components keep their own licences: vendor/LICENSE.tesseract-core and vendor/tesseract.min.js.LICENSE.txt.

Built on tesseract.js.