Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmstoker | Hacker News Reader

Is this meant to be some sort of amusing tool in the spirit of "because we can" or is there a genuine practical purpose to it?

View on HN

No general purpose. I know the guy who made this and the hype actually started on a Minecraft forum for developers where there were a lot of Eclipse vs. IntelliJ arguments. It was a hilarious addition to any “What is the best IDE?” threads! He became quite interested in OCR and thought this would be a fun project and thus MS Paint IDE was born!

>Can read, parse, and highlight code from purely image files

>Finding and replacing of text from image files

These two features actually seem pretty useful. There's been more than one time i've found code as an image or something it would have been nice to be able to copy.

To be honest, it's come up enough that i've wanted to be able to copy text directly from an image I've wondered if such a tool existed. Never enough to actually go look for one, I'm sure many exist, but enough that i've thought about it at least.

There’s an app called Memos on iOS that has that capability. It’s great for searching images for text, for example I use it to take photos of my receipts, menus, screenshots, and entirely it’s on device and nearly instant (with 40k images). I’m sure other apps exist for various platforms and in the same niche. Looks like iOS 15 is adding text selection to their photos tool so if there’s a phone number visible it’s selectable and interactive.

Not totally related, but enough that I’ll give a shout out to tabula. It can ocr tabular data from a pdf. I’m not affiliated but I really need to get my company to contribute $$$ to the project. For now I’ll namecheck them.

https://tabula.technology/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com