Copying and pasting text, media, papers, and other items from one place to another is one of the most useful things a computer can do. The practical part is the same no matter what operating system is being used. And depending on which you prefer—GUI or CLI—can be done smoothly. But you can’t use it to copy text from a picture or other visual document, which is one of the few times it doesn’t work. When it comes to images, it’s clear why you can’t highlight words to get it out. But most other kinds of visual papers don’t let people use the text on them because the selectable attribute is turned off.
So, if you work with media or often need to copy text from images or other papers, you’ll need to look into third-party OCR apps that can do this. TextSniper is a simple and easy-to-use tool for Mac users who want to pull text from images or other visual documents. There are other ways to do this, but TextSniper is a good choice if you want to use text from images or other visual documents.
How does TextSniper work? What is it?
TextSniper is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool that lets you copy text that you can’t pick. You can use it to pull text from images, videos, PDFs, presentations, screencasts, screenshots, websites, and other visual documents. It is part of Setapp, which is a paid service from MacPaw that includes a lot of tools for iOS and macOS apps like Ulysses, Newton, CleanMyMac X, CleanShot X, Keysmith, Remote Mouse, AnyTrans, and more. TextSniper was also featured on ProductHunt, which is a site for finding new products, and made it to their list of products of the day.
TextSniper works by having you press a hotkey (keyboard shortcut) to start the program. It then gives you a crosshair that you can use to pick text in any visual document. As soon as you do that, the app automatically copies the chosen text to the clipboard, where you can then paste it wherever you want.
How to put TextSniper together?
Go to Setapp’s website and download the app to your Mac to get started. You could also get TextSniper straight from the App Store. But if you do that, you won’t get a free 7-day sample.
Setapp is saved as a ZIP (.zip) file when you download it from the website. To see what’s inside this downloaded file, you need a zip tool to “unzip” it. After that, go to the place where you unzipped the file and double-click the TextSniper.app file to run it. You will now see a pop-up that asks you to allow Setapp entry. Go to the Security and Privacy settings on your Mac and let Setapp in.
Next, you’ll need to log in to your Setapp account. If you don’t already have one, you can make one on their website. Once you’ve signed in, go back to Setapp, look for TextSniper, and click the Install button. Now, just like you did when you first gave Setapp access, follow the same steps to give TextSniper access.
TextSniper: How to use it?
One of the best things about TextSniper is that it is easy to use. You only need to do a few things to get text from a picture or other visual document.
Start the TextSniper program. It doesn’t show up in the dock. It lives in the menu bar instead.]
Go to the picture or document (PDF, presentation, web page, etc.) while the app is running in the background. Press the command-shift-2 keys.
When TextSniper is turned on, a crosshair appears. Use this to find the words in an image or document that you want to copy.
Go to where you want to add this text, and then press the command-v keyboard shortcut to paste it there.
TextSniper has more tools.
TextSniper has a button that lets you turn on capture mode, but it also has a few other capture modes to meet your other needs. These things are:
Keep Line Breaks: used to make your recorded text have line breaks.
Command-L is the hotkey.
Additive Clipboard lets you copy text from more than one place and paste it all at once. It’s kind of like adding your history to your clipboard.
Command-H is the hotkey.
Text to Speech: As the name suggests, this mode turns the text from any visual document into its spoken version.
Command-S is the hotkey.
Last, but certainly not least, you can change the option for capturing text. This is already set to command-shift-2. But if you use a lot of shortcuts on your Mac and they clash with the TextSniper shortcut, you can change it to the one you prefer. To do this, click on the TextSniper app icon in the menu bar, choose Preferences, and then click on the Shortcuts tab while the app is open.