OCR tools are not a novelty, in fact, they’ve been around for almost 100 years in one form or another. Recently, most modern desktop and mobile OSes (macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android) have also integrated OCR technologies in their native image/photo viewer tools.
When it comes to Linux, users are not so fortunate, however, there are numerous good third-party tools capable of doing the job just fine.
TextSnatcher is one such tool, a desktop app that relies on OCR technologies and allows you to instantly grab text from your computer’s screen and transfer it to your system’s clipboard, ready for pasting.
The underpinnings
Before anything else, let’s look at the basics. TextSnatcher is an open-source app designed for elementary OS. Be that as it may, it works very well on most other Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Linux Mint included) and can be installed from Flathub.
The app is powered by the Tesseract OCR engine, one of the best and most popular open-source engines of this sort out there.
Grabbing text from your computer’s screen has never been easier
Working with TextSnatcher feels like a walk in the park. You just click the “Snatch” button, make use of your Linux distro’s default screenshot tool (usually it’s best to take a partial screenshot of the area you want to capture), and that’s pretty much it.
You should have the text copied to your computer’s clipboard. However, there are a few things that need mentioning. Please note that the results can vary widely. For example, on lower-res captures, the copied text can have various characters missing (so you might want to check the text before actually using it).
Furthermore, if the text is surrounded by other visual or aesthetic elements, the result can range from total gibberish to something that’s remotely usable.
Verdict
Even though it might not seem the most advanced or imposing app of this sort, TextSnatcher is actually a very nice little app that gets the job done without fuss. It provides users with one of the easiest ways to copy text from images or their screen directly to their computer’s clipboard.
