OCR – optical character recognition – is far from being a new technology. The ability to take a scan or photograph of text and convert it into an editable format is incredibly useful, but there are limitations to what the technology can do. Or at least there were limitations. TextSnipper is a low-cost macOS app that lets you grab text from places you would not otherwise be able to, giving you far greater flexibility when it comes to OCR.

So just what is TextSnipper capable of? In short, if you can see text on your screen this handy app will be able to gran it and convert it into editable text. It does not matter if the text is part of an image, it on a website with copy protection in place, or even if it is included in a video, TextSnipper can capture a screenshot and convert the text for you.

The app stays neatly out of the way until you need it, and it can be called into action using a customizable keyboard shortcut. Once you called up TextSnipper, you can use a selection tool to draw a box around the text you would like to capture, and OCR technology does the rest. There is support for a number of language from the offset, but the developer says that as long as the text you are looking to capture is made up of "common characters" TextSnipper should have no problem converting it into editable text.

When text have been converted, it is automatically stored on the clipboard ready for you to paste into a document. You can opt to include or ignore line breaks, and you also have the option of configuring the app so everything you capture is added to and ever-growing growing clipboard ready to be pasted as one lump. TextSnipper also includes a text-to-speech option.