ClipTess

Copy text from interactive screenshots using Tesseract

A simple Electron-built open-source screenshot app that runs Tesseract on a macOS specific interactive screenshot.

• App lives only in the menu bar for easier use
• Every language supported by Tesseract is supported by ClipTess
• Language can be changed in the menu bar settings (Default is Japanese)

Global shortcut is: ⌥⇧⌘C

Prerequisites

• Must have Tesseract installed on the command line for each language you intend to use ClipTess for. Must be installed through Homebrew as path to command used is /opt/homebrew/bin/tesseract
  • How to download Tesseract through Homebrew:

    brew install tesseract

  • Afterwards, to install all languages, run:

    brew install tesseract-lang 

  • Not all languages are needed, but all will still be displayed in the Change language dropdown menu
• macOS has the screencapture cli tool built-in so no need for macOS users.
  • That being said, this is a macOS-only app despite being built on a cross-platform framework. I just used Electron for the ease of development. I suppose I could always add in the windows equivalent screen capture tool... adding that to my to-do list.

Inspiration

I've spent years looking for a good, lightweight, and simple-to-use macOS version of Capture2Text to no avail. Finally, after learning a good amount of the Electron framework and web development in general, I decided to quickly give the creation of this app a go.

Other apps I've found do a great job at what I need, but the only problem is that they don't use Tesseract under the hood, causing a huge deficit in language compatibility. By using Tesseract through the command line, I've pretty much found a way to make this whole app open-source, thankfully, since I'm assuming other apps are employing their proprietary OCR software under the hood.

Development

1. Clone repository to a local folder using whichever means you prefer. I personally prefer the Github Desktop app.
2. In the repository, run yarn run tsc everytime you want to test a change using yarn electron . in order for TypeScript's tsc compiler to compile all TypeScript files to JavaScript.
   • (Optional) You can have Typescript's tsc cli command globally installed instead and just run tsc everytime you want to compile the files.
3. When you are done making changes, run yarn make to generate your app in the out/ folder.

To Do:

• Allow for a method to change the global shortcut
• Use any Tesseract path installed by user, possibly done through a submenu option or in preferences
• Add a preferences window
• Adapt Change language dropdown menu to user's locally installed Tesseract languages
• Make compatible on Windows using its equivalent screen capture tool
• Add option to wrap lines naturally
• Imitate other ocr clipboard mac apps as close as possible but with Tesseract used instead