In the next article we are going to take a look at TextSnatcher. If you are one of the users who usually work with OCR, you might like to see a simple app built on top of a great complex app like this tesseract. If you are looking for an easy and uncomplicated way to copy text from images in Gnu/Linux, you can take a look at TextSnatcher, as it might suit what you're looking for.
The possibility of extract text from images, PDF files or similar things, is nothing new. Today we can find many different tools to do this job, but at the moment none do it as easily as TextSnatcher can.
This tool performs optical character recognition (OCR) in seconds, which will allow users quickly copy text from anything visible on the screen to the system clipboard, making it ready to paste elsewhere. Character recognition, often known as OCR (from English Optical Character Recognition), is a process aimed at digitizing texts, which automatically identify from an image, symbols or characters that belong to a certain alphabet, and then store them as data. So we can interact with these through a text editing program.
As for the interface of this app, it couldn't be easier to use. We will only have to start it, click on the 'Snatch Now!' button. After we will see the default screen capture tool appear to take a full screen capture, a capture of the current window or select an area to capture (recomendado) focusing only on the text that we want to copy.
General features of TextSnatcher
- This program will allow us copy the text of images with ease, we can perform OCR operations in seconds, with quite good results.
- It has multiple language support. These can be selected from the button on the left side, at the top of the window.
- Will allow us copy the text of the images making a selection of the area.
- Is a fast and easy to use program.
- May see some videos of this program working at their GitHub repository.
- This application uses Tesseract OCR 4.x for character recognition. If you are interested in knowing more, you can read about tesseract y Star Tesseract Project.
Install TextSnatcher on Ubuntu
This program we can find it available as a Flatpak package at Flatub. If you use Ubuntu 20.04 and you still do not have this technology enabled on your system, you can continue The Guide that a colleague wrote on this blog a while ago.
For install this program on Ubuntu, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command in it:
flatpak install flathub com.github.rajsolai.textsnatcher
When the installation of the program is finished, we will only have to look for the launcher on our computer, or run in the terminal to start the program:
flatpak run com.github.rajsolai.textsnatcher
If after starting this software, it does not work correctly or it does not start at all, you may need to install gnome-screenshot. If this is the case, all you have to do is type in a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo apt install gnome-screenshot
uninstall
In case you want remove the program from your system, it will only be necessary to open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and launch the command in it:
flatpak uninstall com.github.rajsolai.textsnatcher
This tool is designed for different operating systems. Although to write this article, I only tested it on Ubuntu 20.04/21.10, with good results in both cases. The motor Tesseract OCR powers this tool and it works great when the selected area is high resolution, or the text to copy is large and clear..
In low resolution or very small blocks of 'text', some characters are sometimes copied to larger. Also if the selection has a lot of decoration, it can lead to some incomprehensible results, as the tool tries to assign text characters to parts of borders, images, etc.