Project Naptha: Make Text in Browser Images Selectable
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderWow - this is amazing. Right this very moment (well, a few moments ago when I wasn't procrastinating on HN) I was in the midst of extracting data from a client's old website in preparation of creating a new website. A lot of that data is contained within images. From a few preliminary tests, I'm hugely impressed. This seems on-par with any other OCR software I've used, and the fact that it happens in realtime in the browser is amazing…
A fun little hack on Android phones (or at least Google Pixels -- this may be disabled by some OEMs). Starting last year the Android Recent Apps screen allows you to select text from the carousel of screenshots of apps. The way they do this is not by actually running the app, but by doing OCR on the screenshots, so you can actually select text that is otherwise not selectable like text in images by opening up recent apps.
What I would really like is a little bit like this but not quite the same: full text search over everything I have ever seen on the computer. It would read and index the emails, web pages, word docs, etc as I open them, then later when I think "I know I saw a doc about cache oblivious algorithms", I can search for it without being distracted by 100K documents I haven't seen. Or I can find that email I…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 1706
- Total comments
- 271
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-04-22 | Project Naptha: a browser extension that enables text selection on any imageFirst breakout · Best thread | antimatter15 | 1055 | 134 |
| 2016-03-01 | Project Naptha: highlight, copy, and translate text from any image | joiguru | 1 | 0 |
| 2016-03-10 | Highlight, copy, and translate text from any image | jfindley | 2 | 0 |
| 2019-09-09 | Project Naptha: Make Text in Browser Images Selectable | polm23 | 324 | 52 |
| 2021-03-29 | Highlight, copy, and translate text from any imageHall induction | yarapavan | 4 | 0 |
| 2021-07-31 | Project Naptha: highlight, copy and translate text from any image in the browser | jitl | 1 | 0 |
| 2022-01-09 | Project Naptha: highlight, copy, and translate text from any image(Chrome-only) | phantom_oracle | 2 | 0 |
| 2022-07-11 | Project NapthaLatest 20+ point return | workah0lic | 317 | 85 |