I’ve demonstrated the built-in ways on macOS and iOS to have your device read to you with text to speech, but TextSniper can do this with graphics containing text. I bet that 100% of the time I use Additive Clipboard I’ll forget to turn it off. When you’re done capturing multiple snippets of text, there’s a menu option to Clear Clipboard History, and uncheck Additive Clipboard. Simply capture repeatedly and you’ll get all of the text in one paste to your text application. TextSniper solves this problem with an option in the menu dropdown called “Additive Clipboard”. If you’re going to be grabbing many snippets of text that you’ll need to assemble later, it would be inefficient to grab the text, switch apps, paste, go back to the graphic, grab another section, and switch back. But if you really just want the text so it won’t look dumb in another application, in the menu bar dropdown you can disable “Keep Line Breaks”. If you’re grabbing text that is in a narrow column, the text you snipe will have line breaks to keep it consistent with what you saw. Now that I have your interest back, let’s dig deeper into what TextSniper can do. Right now only the M1 Macs will be able to use this feature.
You might have dismissed TextSniper immediately because of its inability to accurately interpret handwritten text and you might be thinking, “I’ll just wait till macOS 12 come out.” While it absolutely does look awesome, the optical character recognition that’s coming from Apple requires a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip to work.
Maybe it would save you a bit of typing, but the variations in handwriting are so vast that it really struggles at that task. However, in testing TextSniper on handwritten text, it’s not very accurate at all. TextSniper Preferences Generalīefore we go much further into what TextSniper can do, I’m sure most of you are thinking, “Sure Allison, that sounds great, but how well does it work?” In my testing, if the text on screen is typed, it’s been 100% accurate. If you’re a cranky pants with no joy in your heart, both the playful beepboop and happy thumbs up can be disabled from TextSniper’s Preferences.Īs soon as you capture the text with TextSniper, you can paste it into the app of your choice. In the menu bar app, select capture text, and your cursor changes to cross hairs just as though you’re starting a screenshot.Ĭlick and drag across the area with the text you want to capture, and you’ll hear a playful beepboop sound, and you’ll very briefly see a happy thumbs up on screen that says “Copied to Clipboard”. Before digging into all of the options, let me explain how easily it works. TextSniper is a menu bar app with a very simplistic interface.
Think about this use case, you get a PDF from someone but it hasn’t been OCRd (had optical character recognition applied to it), with TextSniper you can convert it to text. I’m often reviewing an app and want to use the description the developer so carefully crafted, and yet it’s not real text so I can’t copy it. One of the main places I’m aggravated by non-text text is in the App Store. The main problem that TextSniper sets out to solve is to allow you to copy text that isn’t really text, but actually a graphical representation of text. You can also buy it directly from the developer’s website for $6.99 at textsniper.app. The app is called TextSniper, and it’s $9.99 in the Mac App Store or available through Setapp. I’ve got a Mac app tip for you that isn’t quite as cool as what’s coming in the next OS updates for Apple fans, but you can have it now, and you don’t need a brand new Mac to use it. It was, as I said on Shelly Brisbin’s Parallel podcast, the Simone Biles of text recognition. They even demonstrated pointing an iPhone’s camera at a whiteboard and using a finger to drag across the hand-written text and have it actually select it and copy it as text. You’ll be able to select text right out of an image.
During Apple’s WWDC keynote, they showed off some amazing new text recognition features coming to the Mac and iOS.