Capture any text with TextSniper
Recipes, presentations, PDFs… TextSniper captures text from anything
REQUIRES
TextSniper ($9.99), macOS 10.15 or later
YOU WILL LEARN
How to grab usable text from anything
IT WILL TAKE
10 minutes HAVE YOU EVER encountered a web page that won’t let you copy text from it? A recipe that puts all the ingredients in the video but not on the actual page? An image you want to quote, or a fact–packed presentation slide that you need to copy from quickly?
TextSniper can help with all of these things. It’s an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) app, but instead of scanning printed documents it scans what’s on your screen — so you can grab a block of text from that digital magazine, that PDF, that video recipe or anything else you can see on your Mac’s display. In addition to copying the text to the clipboard, it can also read it aloud — which is handy for apps or content that don’t pass editable text along to macOS’s own text–to–speech features. It can also decode QR codes and barcodes.
TextSniper doesn’t work on every Mac: if you’re running macOS older than Catalina, you’re out of luck. But if your Mac is running macOS 10.15 or later, you can take advantage of iOS/iPadOS integration and use TextSniper on images captured, effectively turning it into a document scanner too.
TextSniper is the kind of app we love to see on the Mac; it sets out to do one thing and do it well. And it’s reasonably priced too — it’s just $9.99 on the Mac App Store and it’ll pay for itself by saving you tons of time. You can download a free trial from textsniper.app. CARRIE MARSHALL