Snipping OCR tool

Throughout the past few decades, many hardware manufacturers expanded the range of their offerings to include the consumer market on top of the existing products designed for the business sector. Following in the footsteps of early PDAs, pagers and netbooks, smartphones have become the de facto way to communicate through and navigate the internet for many tech users.

In the search for the most convenient way of storing data and information on a primarily touch-based device, information is usually captured in the form of picture-based screenshots. However, for most desktop users seeking to compile and reuse data, the inflexibility of this format calls for dedicated utilities such as Snipping OCR tool.

By leveraging the power of the Optical Character Recognition standard, the app at hand successfully mimics the functionality of Windows’ built-in snipping tool in order to extract text fragments from non-selectable origins such as photos or application interfaces, thus sparing users from retyping paragraphs and increasing the efficiency of their workflows.

The setup process is relatively straightforward, simply requiring the app’s portable executable to be placed inside the installation directory of a working copy of Tesseract’s OCR implementation hosted by the Mannheim University Library before commencing the character recognition endeavours.