OCR text snip

Summary

Select any part of the screen and Snim copies the text in it to your clipboard. Perfect for error messages, text inside images and videos, or apps that will not let you select. Recognition runs on your own computer, so nothing leaves it.

What you can do

• Start Extract Text (OCR) from the tray menu, or give it a global hotkey.
• Drag over the text: Snim recognizes it and puts it on the clipboard.
• Check the result in a confirmation that shows the full text and how confident the recognition was.
• Get a clear message, with tips, when no text is found in the selection.
• Use it offline: the English language data ships with Snim.

How it works

• The text snip uses the same area selector as screenshots, without the copy and save buttons.
• Snim enlarges small selections before reading them, which helps with tiny interface text.
• Recognition uses the open source Tesseract engine and runs in the background, so Snim stays responsive while it works.

Platforms

• Windows: Supported; the language data comes with the installer and the zip.
• macOS: Supported; the language data is inside the app.
• Linux: Supported in the packages, the tarball and the Flatpak. Selecting works like screenshots: instant on KDE Plasma, and on GNOME you choose your screens once.

Not in this version

• English only, with no language picker yet.
• Plain text only: no layout, tables or formatting.
• No text recognition on saved images or inside the editor yet.

Status

• Shipped in 1.0.0-rc.1