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,…
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 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, it's worked every time. This type of small improvements that remove a ton of daily friction are a blessing. Small thing, but I just thought I'd share this with HN in case it benefits others.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- ZDZerox – Document OCR with GPT-mini2024 · github.com · ▲246
This started out as a weekend hack with gpt-4-mini, using the very basic strategy of "just ask the ai to ocr the document". But this turned out to be better performing than our current implementation of Unstructured/Textract. At pretty much the same cost. I've tested almost every variant of document OCR over the past year, especially trying things like table / chart extraction. I've found the rules based extraction has always been lacking. Documents are meant to be a visual representation after all. With weird layouts, tables, charts, etc. Using a vision model just make sense! In…
Edit Scanned PDFAug 2026 · editscannedpdf.com · ▲1Free online OCR editor to edit scanned PDF text in browser
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