ScreenNCopy

Copying and pasting text is something we're all used to and utilize on the daily, but it's not always possible. It's not an uncommon occurrence to have certain pages forbid text copying, and there's always the video feed problem, whereby you can't copy the text you see in a video or teleconference presentation.

How do you circumvent that? For one, you could try to hastily write everything manually, and It's needless to say that's not the most convenient thing to do. More recently, software to automatically copy that text for you has surfaced, and ScreenNCopy is an example that seeks to deliver on that front.

Getting started with the software doesn't take much: click the executable, and it'll install whatever it needs.  It's simple and to-the-point, and operating the program itself is in the same vein: boot it up, and interact with the Screen N Copy button.

Upon clicking the button, you'll have to drag your cursor over the text you want to copy, as if you were taking a screenshot: the application uses character recognition algorithms to identify text. After doing so, you'll be able to paste the copied elements into any word processor.

Being marketed as a solution to copy text from videoconference presentations, the tool's performance can be way off at worst, and spotty at best. We found that even copying black-on-white text on a Notepad would get the program to fumble.

When getting it to recognize lengthier passages, the software has considerable problems keeping up, even freezing on several occasions for us. We found that it's best to keep it simple, and only use it for short sentences. Especially given that, as you introduce more intricate text, it starts to muddle the words to a point where nothing makes sense. For example, we gave it a simple English text to recognize, and we were stumped to see that some words were recognized as Cyrillic alphabet.

You can't fault ScreenNCopy for what it's trying to do: it's an admirable task, making out text from a video feed via optical character recognition algorithms. The issue is that it needs some under-the-hood adjustments to increase its viability: as it stands, the tool has trouble keeping up to copy text, which defeats its purpose. It's still in early release, though, so it's only up from here.