OCR region of screen

Earnest_Frankly · November 18, 2023, 3:09pm

You know how when you press Cmd Shift 4, the crosshairs appears, which allows you to select a region of the screen to be captured as a screenshot? I would like create another shortcut that, instead of saving the selected region as an image, performs OCR on any text it finds in the selected region and copies it to clipboard. What are the ways to approach this problem?

Becaue the way I do it now super sucks. It’s like: create the image; at the bottom right it appears for qucik editing; click on that; quick editing interface doesn’t freaking have the option to “select text” ; click on share; click on Preview; opens the same image in Preview; menu to “select text”; manually select text with mouse pointer; Command-C

sylumer · November 18, 2023, 5:14pm

Try this in Shortcuts, and assign your own keyboard shortcut to it.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/37e8100717fe41bb85e50b834f6c6e86

I can use it to take a screenshot of your first paragraph and the result (that is placed on the clipboard) comes out like this:

Hope that helps.

darranwest · November 19, 2023, 3:23am

There is an app called Text Sniper which is made to OCR via screen capture. You setup a keyboard shortcut to invoke it (I think the default is shift+command+2) and it captures the area, OCRs any text it finds and then places this in the clipboard.

Their website is below, and I think it is also part of SetApp.