User Guide
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02.5 · Capturing Screenshots

Region Capture with OCR

Region-with-OCR is a shortcut for "grab the text out of that thing on my screen". It combines region selection and text extraction into a single step and skips the annotation editor entirely.

How to Trigger

SurfaceAction
Global hotkeyCtrl+Shift+O (remappable — see 10.2)
Main toolbarClick the OCR button

Behind the scenes this runs CaptureRegionWithOcrCommand.

Workflow

  1. Press Ctrl+Shift+O.
  2. The standard region-selection overlay appears (see 02.1).
  3. Click and drag the rectangle around the text you want to extract.
  4. Release the mouse. Tex runs OCR on the selected pixels immediately.
  5. The OcrResultPopup opens with the extracted text, a confidence percentage, and the processing time.
  6. If Ocr.AutoCopyText is on, the text is already on your clipboard when the popup opens.

What You Skip

Compared to a normal region capture followed by an OCR command:

  • No annotation editor opens.
  • The capture is not added to the inline MainWindow preview.
  • Only the OCR result is surfaced — the original pixels are still added to history if history is enabled.

From the OcrResultPopup you can:

  • Copy the text to the clipboard.
  • Save the text to a .txt file.
  • Share the text via your default mail client.
  • Review confidence and processing time badges.
SettingDefaultEffect
Ocr.LanguageengTesseract language model (29 supported — see 04.3)
Ocr.AutoCopyTextfalseAuto-copy extracted text to the clipboard
Ocr.PreprocessImagetrueRun contrast / threshold / denoise before OCR
Tip

Tip — If the text you want sits in a small UI widget, zoom the source app first (browser zoom, font scaling) then select. Tesseract is far more accurate on text that is at least 20 pixels tall.

See section 04 for the full OCR deep-dive, including language selection, preprocessing, and the OCR history viewer.