Google’s PDF viewer allows text selection. I understand how the user isn’t actually selecting text but simply “drawing” rectangles on top of a PNG image. However, when the user hits CTRL+C, the “selected” text is copied into the user’s clipboard.
I realize that this could be possible using Adobe Flash but Google’s solution seems to work even if you do not have Adobe Flash installed.
How does Google do this ?
see : http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf
for an example.
Short answer: Probably Javascript. Bind Ctrl+C to a function that acquires the OCR’d text in the given region and tells the browser to put it on the clipboard.
As to how that’s done, this might be informative.