Usually, when we think of OCR (optical character recognition) we imagine a sort of app or AI-powered service capable of extracting written characters from images.
NormCap is one such app, a free and open-source, OCR-powered tool. However, instead of capturing text from images, it can capture it from pretty much anywhere on your system.
What’s even more impressive is the fact that it works just as well on all major platforms: Windows, macOS, and most Linux distributions (thanks to the AppImage packaging).
Getting to grips with NormCap
Upon launching the app, a pink border should appear. To capture text, simply use your mouse to select any region of interest on the screen, wait a couple of seconds, and then paste the captured text from the clipboard anywhere you like.
The GUI is quite minimalistic, but the most important thing to remember is that the settings section can be accessed via the sprocket icon in the upper right corner.
You are provided with various options such as the ability to adjust the language (of the captured text, important for the overall accuracy), and a few capture modes.
Before we talk about the capture modes in detail, we should point out that the app also boasts multi-monitor support, including HDPI monitors.
Capture modes explained
You can toggle between two capture modes: parse and raw. The Raw Mode outputs the detected text exactly the way it was captured by the OCR engine. This means that your text will have the same structure (for example, line-breaks are not removed while using this mode).
Conversely, the Parse Mode performs some formatting based on various implemented rules. To be more precise, it uses two steps for this particular task. In the first step, every rule calculates a “score.” This is done to determine the type of text. In the second step, the rule which achieved the highest “score,” will transform the input text according to its type.
These rules are: Single line, Multi line, Paragraph, E-mail, and URL.
NormCap
Even though NormCap might seem fairly similar to most OCR tools out there, the way it works is somewhat different. Therefore, NormCap should provide you with a bit more versatility when it comes to capturing text, as it doesn’t require you to load images.
