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A comment on Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen.

Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by mromanuk on Saturday May 22, 2021 @12:04AM (#27243334)
I’m frustrated that there is no easy way to capture text from pictures. Thank you for building this.

This type of functionality should be integrated or readily available in MacOS.

I would love to have a way to do basic math operations, unit conversions, etc. without resorting to write them in spotlight. For example hovering over a price, it should convert it to a different currency. Or compare similar types of informations from different sources.

Your solution goes in this direction, thanks!

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Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by maven29 on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:18AM (#27245167)
https://antimatter15.com/project/project-naptha/

https://projectnaptha.com/

We had this fully client-side in the browser all the way back in 2013.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by eastendguy on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:54AM (#27245327)
The problem with Naptha is that the OCR quality of Tesseract (used by Project Naptha) is not very good for screenshots. Historically Tesseract has been optimized for text documents. So the OCR results of this new macOCR app are significantly better.

Another alternative is Copyfish. It is cross-platform and uses cloud ocr:

https://github.com/A9T9/Copyfish

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by duckfang on Saturday May 22, 2021 @12:36PM (#27248104)
There is 0 reason to use the cloud, unless exfil and selling data is your thing.

The cloud == someone else's computer. Never forget that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by eastendguy on Saturday May 22, 2021 @02:24PM (#27249035)
My personal reason for using "the cloud" in this specific case is that the OCR results are significantly better.

> The cloud == someone else's computer.

I think everyone around here knows this and can make their own decisions, if and for what data they use "the cloud".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by duckfang on Saturday May 22, 2021 @04:07PM (#27249858)
Be careful speaking about "everyone". You never know who the 10000 are.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by bori5 on Saturday May 22, 2021 @06:02PM (#27250668)
Not everyone’s in the US
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Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by stjohnswarts on Saturday May 22, 2021 @07:54PM (#27251295)
Sure but it's fairly assured that 80% at least are from the USA, possibly higher. Also it's fairly easy to extrapolate the premise of "the 10000" to include the rest of the world
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Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by replwoacause on Saturday May 22, 2021 @01:41AM (#27243845)
There is an app called Text Sniper which works really well and is available on SetApp. I use it constantly and love it.
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Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by loraxclient on Saturday May 22, 2021 @12:50PM (#27248236)
So there actually is a very quiet functionality hiding in MacOS Notes.app I noticed recently.

If you take any screenshot to clipboard that includes some text, then paste it into Notes, it will silently name the resulting image file using the text pictured.

Not terribly useful but I did find it helpful once while taking screenshots for documentation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screen by schappim on Saturday May 22, 2021 @12:11AM (#27243364)
You’re welcome.

It should be pretty trivial for someone to hook this into https://insect.sh/.

[ Parent | on HN ]