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Sometimes, I find myself typing out a lot of text from a screen capture. Its quite tedious.

Is there an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program out there that would allow me to quickly convert the something like a screen capture, or the contents of the Windows clipboard (a bitmap), into text?

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  • See simpleocr.com/OCR_Software_Guide.asp
    – Contango
    May 15, 2013 at 14:04
  • Smart OCR has the best accuracy that I've seen (100% on my sample of C++ source code). As it has the ability to monitor a directory, I could use Macro Express to create a macro that converts any clipboard graphics to text on the clipboard.
    – Contango
    May 16, 2013 at 9:09
  • ABBYY ScreenshotReader also has the ability to do OCR on the clipboard.
    – Contango
    May 16, 2013 at 9:09

4 Answers 4

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Greenshot has a feature like that, but you need to have Microsoft Office installed.

  1. Take a screenshot of the desired area (using the Print Screen key).

  2. In the resulting menu, select OCR.

    enter image description here

  3. The resulting text will end up in your clipboard. As an example, here's the result of me trying it on your post:

    Sometimes. I find myself typing out a lot of text from a screen capture Its quite tedious
    Is there an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program out there that would allow me to quickly convert the something like a screen capture. or the contents of the Windows clipboard (a bitmap), into text?

If you already have the image in your clipboard, you can run the OCR on it by clicking the Greenshot icon in the notification area and selecting Open image from clipboard.

enter image description here

This will then open the same menu shown above.

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  • Thanks for the answer! This seems like a workable solution.
    – Contango
    May 16, 2013 at 9:11
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I ended up using ABBYY Screenshot Reader. Its not perfect (it gets about 10% of chars wrong), but works if you're prepared to do a little editing.

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Yes Nuance Omnipage currently in version 19 (ultimate). The only bad news is it use files. So you would have to screen capture to a file first.

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  • This could be workable: could use Macro Express to create a macro that converts the graphics on the clipboard into text, via Omnipage. However, Omnipage seems to have rather poor recognition quality compared to some of the others I've looked at.
    – Contango
    May 16, 2013 at 9:10
  • @Gravitas What have you compared it against? Have you done actual testing or are you depending on reviews from others? In terms of recognition quality I have never had a issue with that. Sure it is not perfect but no product is.
    – cybernard
    May 21, 2013 at 0:31
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PaperPort 14 can do it but not perfect character recognition, and not free. Often bundled with Omnipage. The latter has a button for pasting clipboard contents but it doesn't work, unfortunately.

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