SnipFast – Extract Highlighted Text from Physical Books
Hi HN, I built SnipFast - a tool that helps you extract important text from an image of a page. If you’ve ever highlighted sections in a physical book and wanted to save or organize them digitally, SnipFast can help. This came from my own frustration. I like to note down ideas when reading, but doing that from physical books was time-consuming. I looked for a tool to solve this, didn’t find one, so I built it. SnipFast lets you: - Automatically detect and extract highlighted text from a page photo (works with most highlighter pens and languages) - Click on sentences in the image to manually…
In plain words
SnipFast is a tool that extracts highlighted text from photographs of book pages and converts it to digital format. It automatically detects most highlighter pen marks across multiple languages, with an option to manually select specific sentences for extraction. The software targets readers, students, and researchers who annotate physical books and want to digitize their notes. It uses a custom machine learning model for highlight detection and runs on a Kotlin backend with a Postgres database.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I built SnipFast - a tool that helps you extract important text from an image of a page. If you’ve ever highlighted sections in a physical book and wanted to save or organize them digitally, SnipFast can help. This came from my own frustration. I like to note down ideas when reading, but doing that from physical books was time-consuming. I looked for a tool to solve this, didn’t find one, so I built it. SnipFast lets you: - Automatically detect and extract highlighted text from a page photo (works with most highlighter pens and languages) - Click on sentences in the image to manually pick exactly what you want to copy It’s aimed at readers, students, researchers - basically anyone who annotates physical books and wants to keep those notes digitally. Under the hood, it uses a custom ML model trained on highlight detection. The app runs on a Kotlin backend with a Postgres database. You can try it for free. Signup is required, but it’s minimal. I offer some credits upfront so people can test it out. After that, there’s a small payment required. The goal is mainly to prevent abuse and to validate whether this is a tool people find valuable enough to pay for. The UI still needs work, and I’m mainly looking for feedback at this stage. I’d love to hear: does this solve a real problem for you? Was anything confusing? What would make it more useful? link: https://snipfa.st Thanks, Tom
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