- A new useful tool is being added to Microsoft PowerToys. PowerOCR is a minimal optical character recognition (OCR) utility for Windows.
- PowerOCR is being developed by Joseph Finney who opened the pull request to announce the PowerOCR he is creating.
- PowerOCR is based on Text Grab, an app already published by Joseph Finney, that uses Microsoft’s Windows.Media.Ocr API.
Microsoft PowerToys is getting a new tool that can simplify extracting text from an image. The new tool, PowerOCR, is being developed by Joseph Finney, the developer who opened the pull request to announce the PowerOCR he is creating. PowerOCR is based on Text Grab, an app already published by Joseph Finney. PowerToys also announced the Screen Ruler component recently which aims to simplify the process to find out the exact size of the elements on the screen.
Optical character recognition
To copy the text, Finney is using Microsoft’s Windows.Media.Ocr API, allowing developers to benefit from optical character recognition functionality. With the help of other developers, PowerOCR’s core functionality seems completed. Thus it may be released within the next few months.
According to Text Grab’s GitHub page, there are multiple modes. The first mode allows users to select a region of the screen and the text will be copied to the clipboard.
Another use case requires clicking on words to attempt copying them. Windows 10 OCR API draws a box around each recognized mode, enabling this mode to work properly. If the user clicks on a region that has no text in it, the Text Grab window stays active. To exit the application, press the escape key, right-click and choose cancel, or Alt+F4.
