Apple Mac
Incredibly fast image OCR.
Scanning text so you can edit it, quote it or reuse it can be a pain, and the apps that do it can cost a lot of money. Not here. TextSniper can extract and recognise text from anything you can see on your Mac’s screen and it does it incredibly quickly. It’s cheap, too.
Not all of the text we see on our displays can be copied via traditional cut and paste. Celebrities’ insincere apologies screenshotted in Notes and shared on social media; text with graphics behind it; scanned or photographed documents such as legal decisions or old newspaper articles; app dialog boxes and options; recipes shown on video; text from presentations or displayed in embedded document readers; text from uneditable PDFs… it’s a very long list, and if you’re involved in things like writing training courses, tutorials, documentation or how-tos you’ll have encountered quite a few of them. TextSniper can handle them all. It can also read bar codes and convert QR codes.
When you run TextSniper it puts a little icon in the menu bar and gives you a new keyboard shortcut: command-up arrow-2. Simply activate the shortcut or select Capture Text from the icon drop-down and draw the selection rectangle over the text you want to recognise. You’ll see a thumbs-up icon and the message Copied To Clipboard. You can then paste the recognised text into your document.
The whole process is incredibly fast. We’ve tried TextSniper on an M1 Mac and on an ageing iMac and it delivered instant results immediately on both machines. And it’s accurate too: provided the source text doesn’t get involved in too much design madness or hasn’t been through 15 photocopiers it copes admirably with coloured text, outlined text, text with umlauts and accents and even very small print. We chucked page after page of PDFs, tweeted images, scans and anything else we could think of at it and it achieved exceptional accuracy even when the text was a little blurry or in multiple languages. If you find it doesn’t recognise particular words, such as legal or medical terms, you can add them to the custom dictionary so it’ll use the correct results in future.
By default, each new copy replaces what’s already in the clipboard, but you can set it to an additive clipboard that appends new text to what’s already there. You can also use the app as a fast text to speech reader.
The app isn’t perfect: it’s purely for text and can get a bit confused with symbols and other design elements, and from time to time it did strange things with line breaks. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise exceptional app that does something small but incredibly useful. Not everybody needs it, but the people who do will love it.
TextSniper is small, speedy and could save you lots of time and frustration.