You can now cut and paste from scanned documents in Firefox
I just realized you can now open a PDF document in Firefox and select text directly from scanned images embedded in the document (so basically transparently reliable doing OCR). It is also surprisingly reliable, only sometimes mistaking a "oh" for a "zero" in a long string of numbers. I neither know when this was introduced nor who added this feature, but from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, you have made my daily life a lot easier. I also haven't really explored the limits of the feature and under what conditions it starts failing, but: in my daily workflow so far,…
You can now cut and paste from scanned documents in Firefox launched on May 24, 2024 with 33 votes, #724 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Firefox now includes optical character recognition (OCR) functionality that allows users to select and copy text directly from scanned images within PDF documents. The feature is designed for anyone who regularly works with digitized documents and needs to extract text without manual retyping. It performs reliably in typical workflows, with occasional minor errors such as confusing the letter "O" with the number "0" in numeric sequences. The tool eliminates the friction of manually transcribing text from scanned documents.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I just realized you can now open a PDF document in Firefox and select text directly from scanned images embedded in the document (so basically transparently reliable doing OCR). It is also surprisingly reliable, only sometimes mistaking a "oh" for a "zero" in a long string of numbers. I neither know when this was…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF2017 · addons.mozilla.org · ▲292Download Copyfish for Firefox. Do you need to extract text from images, videos or PDF? If yes, then the Copyfish free OCR software is for you. Until now, your only option was to retype the text. Copyfish is so much faster and more fun. It can do desktop screenshots and OCR, too.
- PTPDFs that are readable by human eyes only2022 · humaneyesonly.com · ▲216
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't…
My Free OCR Website – want feedback2022 · myfreeocr.com · ▲15MyFreeOcr – Best Online Ocr tool that allows you to convert your PDF, PNG, JPG images into text. Supporting multiple languages.
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 26d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 20d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 14d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
