How to subject any text displayed on the screen to optical character recognition (OCR). The captured text becomes immediately editable and reusable in any program.
Especially in the workplace, there is often the need to submit to optical character recognition or OCR what is shown on the screen or in an uneditable PDF document, for example containing scanned images of paper pages.
copy text from the screen and paste it elsewhere, such as in a wordprocessor or text editor, there are several workarounds. It becomes so very simple extract text from images and copy whatever appears on the display.
Use Google Keep
A good idea to acquire the text shown on the PC screen and subject it to OCR is to save the contents of the window or the portion of interest of the screen and then paste it into an application such as Google Keep.
In all versions of Windows the Print Screen key allows capture a screenshot storing the entire screen in the clipboard as an image.
Windows 10 e Windows 11 they provide many more tools, including a mechanism for selecting and copying into memory what is displayed in a specific area of the screen.
From a web browser, you can open the Google Keep home page, after logging in with your account, then click on the Write a note field and paste the screen image into it by pressing the key combination CTRL+V.
By clicking on the three dots in the column at the bottom of the Google Keep note and then choosing Retrieve Image Text, all the text contained in the pasted image is automatically recognized. At this point the text can be highlighted, copied and pasted elsewhere. The note can then be eventually removed.
In the image in the figure, the content of an error message returned by Windows is correctly recognized by Google's OCR.
How to copy the contents of windows error messages
Not everyone knows that in the case of windows error messages you can use a simple trick to to copy all of displayed text.
When an error appears, just press the CTRL+C key combination: the text of the message (and not the image) will automatically be copied into memory in the Windows clipboard area.
If you were to then pass on this error to a third party, just paste it (CTRL+V) into an email, messaging software or any text editor.
Recognize text on screen with PowerToys Text Extractor
The PowerToys package for Windows 10 and 11 integrates a component called Text Extractor which allows you to recognize the text displayed on the screen, in any area it is located.
Keeping the PowerToys package open (you can check when it is running due to the presence of the icon in the traybar, the area to the left of the system clock, at the bottom right) and pressing Windows+Shift+T you can highlight the portion of the screen to be OCRed. After selecting the area of interest, the content is copied to the clipboard and can be pasted simply by pressing CTRL+V.
The key combination Windows+Shift+T is obviously customizable by pressing the icon depicting a small pencil.
Extract text from images with Google Lens and Chrome
By right-clicking on any image (even those in the Google Photo, Amazon Photos, Microsoft OneDrive or Apple iCloud galleries) and then choosing Search image with Google Lens in the context menu, you will have three options : Search, Text and Translator.
By selecting the Text button, Google Lens indicates all the text that has been correctly recognized: at this point you can select all or part of it and then press CTRL+C to copy it to the clipboard.
The icon at the top right, to the left of the "X", allows you to show the page in full screen so that you can select the text more conveniently.
If you have an image already stored locally and you want to extract the text contained in it, you can select it from File Explorer in Windows, click on it with the right mouse button then choose Open with, Google Chrome. Once opened with Chrome, clicking again with the right button on the image and choosing Search image with Google Lens, you can submit it to OCR.
How to extract text from an image with Microsoft Word
Using a simple trick it is possible extract text from an image even using only Word.
After pasting the image containing the text to be recognized into a blank Word document, you can click on the File menu then Save As.
By clicking on the Browse button, you must select the file name and destination folder, then the PDF format from the Save as menu.
At this point you must close the Word document containing the image and then click on File, Open and choose the PDF file you just generated.
When the message "Word will convert the PDF file into an editable document" appears, click OK: in this way you get all the text contained in the image, selectable, copyable and reusable as you wish.
Extract text from the screen with Text Grab
An application that allows you to recognize the text on the screen so that it can be pasted and reused elsewhere is called a Text Grab.
On GitHub it is available for free but if you want to help the author in developing the program you can buy the version published on the Microsoft Store.
Text Grab it differs from other applications of its same category in that it proposes four different modes for detecting text on the screen and in that, using the Windows API, OCR is entirely performed locally without transmitting any data to remote servers.
In addition to recognizing all text elements shown in full screen, the application allows you to freely position and resize what is called a grab frame: you can move the frame so as to focus on the area of the screen containing the data to be OCRed .
With a click on Grab it is possible to open the text editor integrated in Text Grab and analyze the results of the OCR operation.
If you need to capture a set of structured data such as a table, just click the Analyze content as tables icon.
Scan the image with Photo Scan
In Windows 10 and 11 you can use the free Photo Scan application that can be downloaded and installed from the Microsoft Store.
Photo Scan allows you to submit an image acquired from a scanner, camera or contained in the Windows clipboard to OCR.
Use Easy Screen OCR
Easy Screen OCR is an excellent free program that allows you to extract text from images and copy what is displayed on the screen.
The text acquired with Easy Screen OCR becomes immediately manageable with an editor or with any word processor.
Easy Screen OCR uses a more immediate approach: just start the program and select the area of the screen containing the characters to be recognized. The application starts the character recognition by showing the result in the Text tab. The text acquired in this way can be copied to the Windows clipboard and then pasted where the user prefers.
To extract text from images and copy what is shown on the screen elsewhere, just follow a few simple steps:
1) Download and install Easy Screen OCR by clicking here (official site). There is also a portable version of the program that requires no installation. It can be downloaded by clicking here.
2) After the installation is complete, right-click on the Easy Screen OCR icon shown in the Windows traybar and choose Preferences.
3) Click on Hotkey: the key combination shown is the one that allows you to quickly select the area of the screen to be subjected to OCR.
By default, just press CTRL+1 but you can choose any other key combination.
4) By clicking on Language, Italian must be selected in order to optimize the recognition of texts written in our language.
5) Eventually, referring to the Local tab, you can save the texts as images or even as PDF by checking the corresponding boxes.
6) At this point, by pressing the combination of keys chosen previously or by right-clicking on the Easy Screen OCR icon and finally selecting Capture, you can choose the part of the screen to be subjected to optical character recognition.
The one in the background is an image found on Google Images: pressing the key combination or choosing Capture transforms the mouse pointer into a "multicolor" version.
After selecting the area of interest, with a click on the OCR button, the highlighted text is automatically transformed into editable text.
7) By clicking on the Text tab you will find the recognized text ready to be copied elsewhere and reworked freely.
Once the job is done, just close Easy Screen OCR by right-clicking its icon and choosing Exit.
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