OCR - Image Reader vs PDFgear

OCR - Image Reader

OCR - Image Reader is a Chrome extension from developer brian.girko that adds a toolbar button for on-the-fly optical character recognition. Press the button, drag a selection over any region of the active window, and the extension reads the text inside it using a Tesseract-based engine that supports over 100 languages with automatic orientation and script detection. A second engine option, IBM Granite-Docling, goes further and preserves headings, lists, bold and italic styles, tables and even mathematical equations instead of returning flat text. Everything runs offline in the browser, with no server round trips apart from a one-time download of the language training data.