Textsniper
An image OCR that’s faster than a bullet
$6.99 From Valerijs Boguckis, textsniper.app
Needs macOS 10.15 or later
Scanning text to edit it, quote it, or reuse it can be a pain — and the apps that do it can be expensive. Not here. TextSniper can extract and recognize text from your Mac’s screen incredibly quickly. It’s cheap, too.
TextSniper can handle all manner of text we see on our displays: celebrities’ insincere apologies screenshotted in Notes and shared on social media, text with graphics behind it, scanned or photographed documents, 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. TextSniper 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: Cmd+Shift+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 recognize. You’ll see a thumbs–up icon and the message Copied To Clipboard. Then paste the recognized 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 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 colored 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 recognize particular words, such as legal or medical terms, you can add them to the custom dictionary.
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 sometimes it did strange things with line breaks. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise exceptional app.
THE BOTTOM LINE. TextSniper is small, speedy, and could save you lots of time and frustration. CARRIE MARSHALL