The problem is that I have Windows 10 instead of macOS. I looked up online some alternatives for Windows but some are either very bad as they don't have smart OCR (read dag instead of dog and put dog as output because dag does not exist and the closest word is dog). While TextSniper is a fantastic option for all-purpose usage, OwlOCR works great for its Optical Character Recognition function for images with text, any on-screen texts, and PDFs that don't let. TextSniper is a new Mac app that I wish I had been in years ago. It takes the text in a graphical or non-selectable File, and uses Optical Character Recognition ( OCR) to convert it into real text. It is as simple to use as taking a screengrab and then pasting it together. TextSniper is Mac OCR (optical character recognition) software that allows extract text from a selected portion of your screen and almost instantaneously get it saved to clipboard as editable text. TextSniper lets you take a screenshot of anything on your screen and pulls out the text, adding it to your clipboard. It does a good job with the OCR. In the screenshot gallery below, you can see the screenshot and the resulting text pasted into Drafts.
When someone wants to be more productive on their Mac, most of the time they don’t install good apps or drastically change their ways to try to achieve it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of installing small utilities on your devices, like Undisturbed or Couch Potato. Today I will talk about another of these utilities.
How many times have you seen yourself with the task of copy text that is in a scanned image? You may be familiar with the situation: the text is at a good resolution, but since it is in a JPG image, it cannot be copied and pasted directly and must be handwritten. Application TextSniper wants to resolve these situations.
Capture, paste some text and go
TextSniper is installed on our Mac with the intention of not attracting attention at all times. The only trace is an icon in the top bar of macOS, which displays a menu with some of the program’s options. The main: take a screenshot, recognize the text it contains and automatically copy it to the clipboard. We can do it via this menu or via a keyboard shortcut.
Additionally, we can configure TextSniper so that tell us the text you managed to capture (supports seven languages including English and Spanish) and customize the keyboard shortcut to enable capture or pause voice dictation. The tests I carried out gave me good results:
In the case of a photo I took from a book, all the text is recognized including the hyphen on the last line, although embed line breaks which do not correspond to those of the original text. Nothing that can’t be solved in an instant with the backspace key, and of course, it’s a lot less work than writing all the text by hand. In the case of capturing a tweet, there is a character that has been omitted and a symbol that has been interpreted as the “&” character. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly not a bad result.
The app is also already optimized for all Macs with M1 chip which have been published in recent weeks. Its maintainers told me that the transition to compiling TextSniper for Apple Silicon is very easy, as they don’t rely on too many third-party libraries that need further tweaking. In addition, they also reveal to me that they are working on improvements such as support for more languages in the future.
TextSniper requires macOS Catalina or later and takes up only 1.7MB on the disk. It costs 9.99 dollars in the Mac App Store, although you can buy it for 5.45 dollars from the web if you prefer. If you’re someone who always copies text from pages on paper, wherever they come from, maybe this little investment improves your pace of work a lot.
Buying from the official website allows installation on three computers, while purchasing from the Mac App Store allows installations on any Mac that you signed in with your Apple ID. Oh and it’s a one-off payment: no subscription. At the moment, there is no version for iOS or iPadOS, although the developers are already studying to be able to offer it.
Text Sniper App
TextSniper is a super simple and easy to use text recognition tool for your Mac. It extracts any text within the selected portion on your screen and turns it into editable text. Below is our recent interview with Valerijs Boguckis from TextSniper:
Q: What is TextSniper?
Textsniper Windows
A: With TextSniper, you don’t need to upload anything or have to think about file types. Is it an image, a digital document like PDF or a video? It all doesn’t matter. Once you launch TextSniper, you are ready to capture any text on your screen. The app lives in the menu bar, so it’s out of the way but on hand when needed. Besides that, text recognition is lighting fast, with superior accuracy, and does not require an internet connection.
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Q: Tell us more about what you do to help businesses with technology?
A: It helps and saves a lot of time for businesses who have to deal with some text that is provided in graphic form or is non-copyable from documents. It could be technical support teams that receive error messages as a screenshot or editors who need to quote some text from company statements as on Twitter for example, where they get around the character limit by posting an image of the statement. One of the best features of Textsniper is that you don’t have to process the whole file to extract only one or a few lines of text. It is just a huge time saver and productivity booster.
Q: Who is this new application built for? Who are your users?
A: Literally for anyone who finds annoying retyping any non-selectable text. The idea to build TextSniper was born from my personal, trivial use-case. I was watching a YouTube video tutorial and on the video was a link I needed to paste into another app. The link was quite long and the only option was to retype it. Then I thought, would not be great, if I just could draw a selection around this link on the video and turn it to typed text and then easily paste anywhere I need. No mistyping and the job is done in seconds.
Q: What makes this application different than other similar solutions available?
Textsniper Mac
A: There are plenty of other OCR solutions on the market. But most of them have one common workflow. First, you have to upload a document to a server or load it to a desktop application, then after the text is processed, copy the desired text into the clipboard and only then the text is ready for paste. Textsniper does text recognition simpler, eliminating all these extra steps. It is as easy as to take a screenshot. Just select the desired text area on your screen and in seconds you will get a truly editable text that you can paste directly into any open application. Also, TextSniper doesn’t require an internet connection, so you can use it anywhere.
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Q: What are your plans?
A: We’re just getting started. We have already gathered a lot of positive feedback and great suggestions. So TextSniper will be getting better and better. We already released our first update introducing some new features, like paragraph mode. Soon we will release a next update, which will include a feature to turn captured text to speech. We hope this new addition will help some people who have difficulties reading text on the screen. So, you are welcome to try the app and stay tuned.
Textsniper Free
Last Updated on October 18, 2020
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