🔬Alpha Preview — Scanned & image PDF, first page, Chinese output. More coming soon.
ALPHAScanExplain
Translate & explain scanned and image-based PDFs — the ones every other tool rejects. In-browser OCR + AI-powered insight. Free Chrome extension.
🧪 Alpha Preview — First-page scanned/image PDF only. Chinese output. Expect rough edges & rapid iteration.
Why ScanExplain Exists
Every major translation tool rejects scanned and image-based PDFs. We built ScanExplain to fill this gap.
| Tool | Product | Scanned PDF Support |
|---|---|---|
| Immersive Translate | BabelDOC | ✗ Does not support scanned, image-based, or OCR-based PDFs |
| Immersive Translate | PDF Pro | ✗ Not suitable for scanned PDFs and academic papers |
| Google Translate | Document Translation | ✗ Scanned PDFs return empty or garbled text |
| DeepL | Document Translator | ✗ Requires selectable text — image PDFs silently fail |
| ScanExplain | Chrome Extension | ✓ In-browser OCR + AI translation & explanation |
What It Does
5 features available now. 3 more in active development.
In-browser OCR
Runs entirely in your browser. No server upload, no data leaves your device.
AI Translation
Recognized text is translated to Simplified Chinese using LLM. More target languages planned.
AI Explanation
Not just translation — get lexical breakdowns, etymology, and contextual insights on any text block.
Select & Explain (Web)
Select any text on any webpage and get an AI-powered explanation popover. Works on all sites.
7 Theme Variants
Basic, Pro, Creative, Galaxy, Neon, Cyberpunk, Aurora — pick the popover style you like.
Multi-page Processing
Process entire documents, not just page one.
Multi-language Output
Translate and explain in English, Japanese, Korean, and more.
Save & Library
Bookmark explanations and build a personal knowledge library.
Document Support
Built for scanned & image PDFs that other tools reject. More formats on the way.
Scanned PDF
Paper documents digitized by scanner
First page only
Image-based PDF
PDFs containing embedded images instead of text layers
First page only
Regular PDF (text-based)
Standard PDFs with selectable text
Planned for next release
Multi-page PDF
Full document processing beyond page one
In development
Image files (PNG / JPG)
Standalone image uploads for OCR
Single image
EPUB / DOCX
Other document formats
On the roadmap
Browser Support
Chrome first. Other Chromium-based and cross-platform browsers on the roadmap.
Chrome
Alpha available now
Edge
Planned — shared Chromium engine
Firefox
Planned
Safari
Planned
⚠️ Known Alpha Limitations
- •Only the first page of a PDF is processed in this Alpha. Multi-page support is in development.
- •Translation output is Simplified Chinese only. More target languages coming soon.
- •AI explanation is in Chinese only.
- •In-browser OCR works best with printed text. Handwriting recognition is not supported.
- •Very large files (>50 MB) may cause slower processing due to browser memory limits.
- •The popup UI and PDF Reader page are functional shells — full integration is in progress.