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Show HN: You can now cut and paste from scanned documents in Firefox
33 points by ur-whale on May 24, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
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.



I worked with the PM who made this happen, Karen Kim. She was able to get things working performantly on Mac but not elsewhere (yet) so this won't show up for Windows or Linux Firefox users (yet.)


I'm on Linux


Looks like you're on Mac: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/text-recognition

There's also a chance your scanner's OCR function was recently enabled by default. The feature is still sitting as "planned for the future" in their PDF library: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/15843


> Looks like you're on Mac

Nope, Linux.


This is useful but I hope not-OCRing PDFs does not become the norm because of it. My local city council doesn't ocr their minutes, but they do OCR "archived minutes" (3+ years old). So if you want to do a search for some specific topic they may have discussed more recently, you're shit outta luck. The Firefox thing seems useful, this other thing just annoys me and this seems like the appropriate outlet to complain about it.


If you're on a Mac you can do this in Preview too. Not just PDFs but any image.




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