ReadSnap

Chrome extension that captures full-page or area screenshots, extracts text using OCR, and saves everything to Readwise Reader.

Features

• Full-page capture — automatically scrolls and stitches the entire page into a single image
• Area selection — draw a rectangle to capture a specific region
• Built-in OCR — text extraction powered by Tesseract.js, running 100% locally in your browser
• Multi-language — supports English, Italian, or both
• Keyboard shortcuts — ⌘⇧S full page, ⌘⇧A area select (Ctrl on Windows/Linux)
• Auto-tagging — configure default tags for organizing captures in Readwise
• Private — no data sent to third parties, no analytics, no tracking

Setup

1. Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store (review pending)
2. Click the extension icon → Settings
3. Enter your Readwise access token (get it from readwise.io/access_token)
4. Start capturing

Development

npm install
npm run build      # Vite bundle + copy static assets to dist/
npm run dev        # Vite watch mode (run full build first)

Load dist/ as an unpacked extension in chrome://extensions with Developer mode enabled.

How it works

Popup / Keyboard shortcut
  → Service Worker (orchestrates capture)
    → Content Script (area selection overlay)
    → Offscreen Document (image crop/stitch + Tesseract.js OCR)
    → Readwise API (save)

All image processing and OCR runs locally in an offscreen document. The WASM binaries and language data are bundled in the extension package.

Tech stack

• Chrome Extension Manifest V3
• Vite — build tooling
• Tesseract.js v5 — OCR engine (WASM)
• Chrome Offscreen Documents API — DOM/Canvas access for image processing
• Cache API — workaround for MV3 fetch restrictions in web workers

Privacy

All OCR processing happens locally. The only external communication is with the Readwise API using your personal token. See Privacy Policy.

License

MIT