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

A Chrome 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.

1. Download this repo or git clone it
2. Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode
3. Load unpacked → select the folder
4. Pin the extension — the toolbar icon doubles as the page counter

Everything needed is committed. There's no build step: npm install is only for running the tests or re-vendoring Tesseract.

Then check chrome://extensions/shortcuts and confirm the hotkeys landed — Chrome silently leaves them blank when something else already claims them.

It asks for no site access at install. Single captures ride on activeTab, which Chrome 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.

⌥⇧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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

⌥⇧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.

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.

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.

MV3 service workers have no DOM and no Worker, so the heavy lifting lives in an offscreen document.

run loop ─┐                        (⌥⇧A: capture → turn → repeat)
hotkey ───┴▶ background.js ─▶ hide our own HUD, wait for a paint
                            ─▶ chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab   (whole viewport)
                            ─▶ offscreen: crop to the region, upscale, greyscale
                            ─▶ store the page + thumbnail, turn the page
                            ─▶ queue ─▶ offscreen: 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 service worker, and a one-minute alarm restarts the loop if the worker is recycled anyway.

npm install
npm test            # add -- --headed to watch it
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.

• chrome:// pages, the Web Store and 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.
• Chrome rate-limits screenshots 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.
• activeTab does not reach cross-origin iframes. If your reader lives in one, grant the site from the popup before setting up auto-advance.

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.