screentext

An easy way to extract text from screenshots via OCR.

Every time you take a screenshot, it gets send to an OCR and the parsed results are saved as ORIGINAL_FILENAME.json in the same directory

Reqs

• OCR API Key. Get yours at http://www.ocrwebservice.com/account/signup
• jq. brew install jq or see https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/ if on a different OS.

If using the applescript, then:

• Mac
• Internet access when taking the screenshot

Note: I'm running the shell script via applescript folder actions but it can also be set up via a cron job, run it in terminal, or whatever works for ya ;)

Install

• Edit "Image - Convert to Text.scpt" to point to your shell script location! (Line 11)
• Copy "Image - Convert to Text.scpt" to "/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts"
• Find the directory where your screenshots are saved and add the apple script folder action.
• Create a file named env-vars in the same directory as the shell script. It contains your OCR_API_KEY var as export OCR_API_KEY=YourAPIKeyGoesHere

Todo

• Investigate other third party OCRs as the current OCR call doesn't seem to be as accurate..
• Make more generic and update the applescript