OCR (short for Optical Character Recognition) is without a doubt one of the most useful technologies, even though it’s not something most users use on a daily basis.
OCR has proven itself remarkably useful when it comes to digitizing historic books, newspapers, and texts. OCR is also very useful when it comes to transforming printed materials of all sorts into digital text files. What’s more, it also plays a great role in accessibility, allowing users to grab texts from images on their devices.
dpScreenOCR is lightweight, cross-platform (works on Windows and most Debian-based Linux distros), open-source, and free OCR app.
The main highlights
It may not look impressive, but dpScreenOCR is surprisingly competent for what it is. It’s powered by Tesseract (an open-source text recognition engine with one of the best availabilities out there), which means that it also supports a plethora of languages.
In the case of dpScreenOCR, the supported languages are well over one hundred. What’s more, it can even split independent text blocks (like columns).
Installation and usage
dpScreenOCR is a simple app, by all means, and purposes. Once installed, you can choose the desired language from the Main tab. To capture text, simply move the mouse cursor on top of the screen area containing the text in question, and press the designated hotkey (which is configurable).
Select the text you want to grab and press the hotkey again, and that’s pretty much about it. Of course, you can also choose how the app reacts to the recognized text. From the Actions tab, you can set up the app to either copy the text to the clipboard, add text to History, and even run an executable.
One of the best things about dpScreenOCR is the documentation section, something that Linux users are not typically privy to.
The comprehensive manual does a good job of explaining everything a user needs to know, from installation to how to make the most of what dpScreenOCR has to offer. There’s also a Tweaking section that’s primarily intended for advanced users or developers, and it shows you how you can change various settings that are not available in the app’s GUI.
Conclusion
dpScreenOCR is a useful little OCR app that should come in handy to everyone who wants to grab text from images on their Linux devices. It does require a bit of reading before you can actually set it properly, but other than that, it should work nicely.
