by me_again on 7/11/22, 5:34 AM
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 read, without finding the same phrase in a bunch of junk mail I never opened.
Does anything remotely similar exist?
by conorcleary on 7/11/22, 3:43 AM
Submitters need to get back to more descriptive titles on HN. If this post is the first and only exposure to this project for a user, "Project Naptha" alone doesn't give me confidence to roll the dice and click on an unknown link unless there are existing comments I can investigate. Thus, chicken and egg, scroll by.
by keyle on 7/11/22, 3:54 AM
Interesting but I thought my mac already does this? Maybe just M1 and Monterey.
I was trying to debug some image the other day, upon inspection I got confused by the shadow dom doing weird stuff, but only in safari; to then realise that it was macOS converting the text in the image to text in shadow dom! ... Good/bad experience report I suppose.
ref. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/m...
by jordemort on 7/11/22, 5:38 AM
This needs a year annotation - I almost emailed to express interest in a Firefox version until I noticed the references to Chrome 36 and Google+
by shubhamjain on 7/11/22, 5:32 AM
This makes me feel old. I saw it for the first time in 2014 on HN, just when it was announced. I felt kind of envious of Kevin Kwok, author of this project. I had just graduated and he was still an undergrad. He had already shipped so many complex projects, including a full-fledged Flash Animator[1] for the web.
It's pretty surprising to see that his site hasn't been updated since 2015 and not many projects have been shipped since then.
[1]: https://antimatter15.com/project/ajax-animator/
by zxexz on 7/11/22, 6:45 AM
by draugadrotten on 7/11/22, 6:56 AM
by emmelaich on 7/11/22, 7:08 AM
by metadat on 7/11/22, 5:35 AM
Does Naptha still work? I recently reviewed all installed chrome extensions and it seemed broken, so I removed it.
by Nition on 7/11/22, 8:43 AM
A related trick for
text that you can't usually select: Hold Alt. For instance try using the mouse to select text in
http://www.google.com with and without Alt.
by tim-- on 7/11/22, 4:50 AM
I had this extension on my Chrome browser a few years ago, and was dumbfounded when I thought that Chrome had added the ability to not only OCR PNG files - but also replace the text in them!
Completely forgot that I installed this extension years earlier.
Crazy extension!
by mcintyre1994 on 7/11/22, 8:12 AM
I love this idea, Apple recently added it for saved photos on iOS and I think in preview too? It doesn't seem to be working for me though. I highlighted some text, hit ctrl + c and got this in my clipboard:
<[ TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS / MORE INFO: http://projectnaptha.com/process/ (IDX:a:0-a:1-a:2-b:7&a:0&a:0&168&817:XDI) / ELAPSED 26.11SEC / DATE Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:08:50 GMT / TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS ]>
The right-click translate doesn't seem to work either, it just selects a whole paragraph.
by _tom_ on 7/11/22, 6:31 AM
Nice! This works slightly better than apple's version, which makes it very hard to select the main image, once it detects text in the image. Naphtha seems to handle this correctly!
by ralfd on 7/11/22, 10:43 AM
This is a cool project, but this is a bit embarrassing:
> I started building a text recognizer algorithm specifically designed for Impact font, and it was actually working pretty well, but I kind of misplaced the code somewhere. So, until I find it or replace it, you'll have to use Tesseract configured with the "Internet Meme" language.
by jzer0cool on 7/12/22, 12:11 PM
With a chrome extension, are there any trust, security, privacy issues enabling an extension with an unfamiliar organization as well as leak what sensitive images are being transferred.
I wonder also why such "convert" options are not made available or are they in the works?
by jtth on 7/11/22, 5:04 PM
I find things like TextSniper to be more useful than this functionality, which has been in iOS and MacOS for a little bit. I use it more on hypothetically selectable elements that for whatever DOM-related reason aren't selectable than I use it on text in images.
by LegitShady on 7/11/22, 3:54 AM
the front page still contains references to google+
by rexreed on 7/11/22, 11:29 AM
This project is almost a decade old! I wonder why it resurfaced? Coincidentally or perhaps not the book in the post "How to do nothing with nobody all by yourself" also is a top HN post right now. Maybe related?
by poulpy123 on 7/11/22, 12:47 PM
what I would like to find is a free a cheap way to OCR my handwritten notes. I know that handwritten is much more difficult but it would be possible to use supervised learning mon my specific handwriting.
by holler on 7/11/22, 4:04 AM
Really cool! I went to try the translate feature but each time I left-click to open the nav menu (macOs) it deselects the text? I know it says right-click but for me it's left-click to open the menu.
by a-dub on 7/11/22, 12:29 PM
last time i saw this the ocr component of it was tesseract (originally hp's c++ ocr engine, later acquired and open sourced by google, even later rewritten to use neural networks) compiled into webassembly.
by avmich on 7/11/22, 6:57 PM
> Unfortunately, your browser is not yet supported
Latest version of Firefox? Seriously?
by nit987 on 7/11/22, 6:24 AM
Hey, loved it. How much time it took to develop this?
by adastra22 on 7/11/22, 6:42 AM
> Unfortunately, your browser is not yet supported
Safari on macOS.
by moneywoes on 7/11/22, 5:23 AM
What's the catch?
