Hello, this time I'll share with you a program that I've just used like 12 times over the last 2 or 3 years, but in those 12 times it has saved me from the life draining task of transcribing text from an image or the screen.
The program I'm talking about is called "NormCap"… NormCap is basically a frontend to an OCR (On-Screen Reader) called "Tesseract-OCR". NormCap makes "reading" an image or the screen as easy and straightforward as possible.
Before explaining how to use NormCap, let's install it first. For instructions on how to install NormCap on your Operating System, refer to NormCap's Github page: https://github.com/dynobo/normcap/#quickstart
For my system (Linux), the easiest way is through Flatpak:
flatpak install com.github.dynobo.normcapYou may also need to install Tesseract-OCR in your system, again, search on how to do it for your specific case https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract#installing-tesseract, for mine (Linux, arch-based distro), is:
sudo pacman -S tesseract tesseract-data-osd tesseract-data-eus tesseract-data-engNow that we have NormCap (and Tesseract-OCR) installed, we just need to open it… When we open NormCap, a few seconds later we should see the following:
- A "magic wand" icon in the taskbar (highlighted in green in the screenshot above).
- A pink frame surrounding the entire screen. That's the default capture/analysis area.
- A pink cog icon in the upper-right corner of the screen to access NormCap's prefferences (highlighted in red in the screenshot above).
You can click and drag the mouse to define a specific area of the screen to capture/analyse or you can just hit [Esc] to cancel the capture/analysis (click again in the magic wand icon to define a capture/analysis area).
When you define a rectangle to capture/analyse, the wand icon in the Taskbar will "vibrate" to let you know is analyzing the contents of the area and extracting the text. When it finishes (a few seconds later) he extracted text is automatically sent to the clipboard and you just need to paste it wherever you want, like a text editor or LibreOffice document.
The capture is not perfect all the time, depending on the legibility of the text in the screen/image, the OCR engine can struggle to "read" it.
I use NormCap to copy unselectable text in PDF documents, wallet seed phrases from my phone (mirroring the phone's screen to my PC), etc. Nothing super fancy, I use it to save time and hassle.
As always, if you find these tools useful, consider donating to their developers. Below I leave you with NormCap and Tesseract-OCR source code pages for you to visit and donate.
Tesseract-OCR
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract