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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T12:38:30+00:00

Google’s PDF viewer allows text selection. I understand how the user isn’t actually selecting

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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.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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.

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