Is there a utility to do OCR on images on the windows clipboard? [closed]

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?

3

4 Answers

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.

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.

This will then open the same menu shown above.

1

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.

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.

2

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.