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© 2020, Frédéric Blondiau — DouWère, s.p.r.l.
Clipboard Image to Text is a service that allows you, every time you copy an image, to paste its text, directly, without further manipulation.
Finally an OCR solution
as simple as copy/paste!
Version 1.1.2 is a maintenance release that always correctly handles preferences (even when using the application main window).
Version 1.1 implements a preference window, to select preferred languages on Big Sur (as many are now available on this new OS).
You can also reverse the effect of the alternate key for handling multiline text as a single string, by default.
Clipboard Image to Text 1.0 is the first public version.
The application requires Mojave, but works even better on Big Sur. It runs natively on Apple Silicon devices.
The application is not document based : you can’t read or create documents using Clipboard Image to Text... the application just process the clipboard.
⚠️ Of course, the content of the Clipboard should be an image (jpg, png, pdf, bmp...) — if it is not the case, the application displays warning.
See Practical uses for more information.
Unlike the majority of other tools available for text recognition, the Clipboard Image to Text application uses the latest artificial intelligence techniques in the world of vision. The results are quite surprising.
Copy an image, launch the application: the content of the clipboard is displayed, ready to be transformed into text... After processing, the new content of the clipboard appears. It can be pasted into any other application that accepts some text.
However, it is not necessary to use the Clipboard Image to Text application. Indeed, the text of the clipboard image is directly accessible to any application in use, by accessing its Services menu (present in the menu of this application) or by accessing the shortcut menu (control clic) or even this key combination.
You can fill the clipboard with a text snap from your Photo Library, with a scanned text you got as a Mail attachment, with a picture from a web site visited using Safari or by any other mean... you just need to copy it, using the Copy command in the Edit menu.
You can also copy any picture directly from the Finder -- copying the file containing the picture, without even a need to open it.
Finally, you can just copy what you see on your screen... wherever this text comes from. Indeed, a less known feature of macOS lets you capture a part of the screen using this key combination ⌃⇧⌘4 ... ready to be pasted using ⌃⇧⌘V, the key combination that invokes the Clipboard Image to Text helper !
All treatments are done locally, thanks to a service offered by the operating system. No information is transmitted.
Currently (in Mojave), recognition works particularly well in English, although other languages based on a Roman alphabet often give good results.
The possible languages for the next version of the OS are English (en-US), French (fr-FR), Italian (it-IT), German (de-DE), Spanish (es-ES), Portuguese (pt-BR), and Chinese (zh-Hans and Zh-Hant).
The recognized text usually contains newlines, to keep the structure it has in the image from which it is extracted. Sometimes this is not what is desired: for example, when we want to retrieve the text of a paragraph from a book ... by pressing the option key, these line breaks are deleted (and, as far as possible, the possible hyphenation of certain words is deleted).
Not really, but...
It is possible to copy an image on your iPhone ... thanks to Handoff, the phone’s clipboard is automatically transferred to the Mac where Clipboard Image to Text can handle it.
😀
© 2020, Frédéric Blondiau — DouWère, s.p.r.l.