Ozyr

OCR stands for optical character recognition, a technology that allows you to extract text from images and save it to an editable document. The most frequent situations when an OCR tool is needed are those when you need to transform scanned documents into editable, digital ones.

There are various OCR tools available online but, like many other computer users, you might concern yourself with the risks of uploading your documents to an online service. That is why an offline OCR tool might serve you better and, if released under an open-source license, even better. One example is Ozyr, one of the most simple and user-friendly OCR tools that works offline.

After a quick and streamlined installation process, Ozyr displays its main window, a black-themed small window with only two buttons and a drop-down list. The minimalist approach might raise doubts about the application’s functionality. But simple does not necessarily mean not useful. On the contrary, this application works efficiently and as promised, it delivers OCR functions without the hassle of a complicated GUI.

You start by clicking on the “Scan” button and Ozyr allows you to select the area to analyze with the OCR engine. You can select a rectangular area, a window or the entire screen. Freeform snip is possible as well. Up to this point, Ozyr’s functionality resembles that of a classic screen capture tool. In fact, the snapshot is saved and can be instantly opened with the built-in Snipping Tool in Windows for further editing.

What Ozyr actually does is take the captured screenshot and use its OCR engine to extract text in it. The extracted text is shown within the main window, where you can edit it freely. Ozyr relies on the Tesseract OCR engine to carry out text extraction. By default, it supports some of the most frequently used languages, namely English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Catalan.

Using Tesseract as its OCR engine, Ozyr makes it possible to take a snapshot of any desktop area and extract text inside it. The resulting text can be easily edited before copying it to the clipboard and save it to a plain text file.