SMRTR Science & EngineeringJul 7, 2026Hacker News

OCR Buddy: local browser OCR for code, formulas (LaTeX) and tables

SMRTR summary

OCR Buddy is a free, open-source Chrome extension that captures text from any part of your screen — including paused videos, PDFs, and images — and converts it into clean, accurate text without sending data to any server. Unlike AI-based OCR tools that can invent plausible-sounding but wrong text, OCR Buddy uses a classic detection-based approach that leaves blanks rather than guessing. It handles regular text, code, math formulas rendered as LaTeX, and tables, achieving nearly 100% character accuracy on clean content.

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