ABBYY Screenshot Reader free Christmas promotion.

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Dec 14, 2011 at 09:38 PM

+ 1 for what @dan7000 wrote.
I think AutoHotKey could be used to create a Hotkey for ABBY SR.

I have been using ABBY SR since it came bundled with scanner software for a new EPSON scanner that I bought several months ago. It captures either ordinary text that is in a window on the screen (basic clipboard function), or OCRs text from an image that you take a clip of. Either process takes a few clicks of the mouse, but it works well.
The OCR process bit though is very good, and I am unaware of any other clipping tool that does that so easily and effectively.

An exception might be the OneNote screen clipping tool, which captures an area of the screen and saves it as an image in a Notebook. You can then right click on the image to OCR and extract any text in the image, which gets saved to the Clipboard. This process is a bit more roundabout than using ABBY SR, if the text is all you want from the image, but it’s unique to NoteBook (AFAIK) in that, if you *keep* the clip image in the Notebook, then the text in the image is always found in a text search of your notebooks - i.e., the text in the image is data in your Notebooks.
That - having embedded text in images form part of your searchable data - is also one of the advantages of online Evernote (apparently the client-based offline Evernote does not offer that facility, presumably because, if it did, it could tend to make parts of the online service redundant or at least could potentially reduce their business model benefits).