Turn Screenshots into Editable Text Instantly with TextShot – A Simple OCR Tool
TextShot, a newly released open‑source Python utility by GitHub user ianzhao05, lets you capture any screen region and instantly convert the image to editable text using Tesseract OCR, with multilingual support, hotkey integration, and step‑by‑step installation guidance for Windows and Linux.
What is TextShot?
TextShot is a lightweight open‑source tool published by GitHub user ianzhao05 that captures a screenshot region and immediately performs OCR to produce text.
How to use
Run textshot.py; an overlay appears on the screen where you draw a rectangle around the desired area. Optional command‑line arguments specify languages, e.g., python textshot.py eng + fra for English primary and French secondary. Ensure the corresponding Tesseract language data files are installed.
For Windows you can bind the tool to a hotkey using an AutoHotkey script (textshot.ahk is provided). On Ubuntu add a custom shortcut in the Keyboard Settings that runs /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/textshot.py, using the virtual‑environment interpreter if applicable.
Installation steps
Install Python 3.
Clone the TextShot repository.
(Optional) Create a virtual environment, e.g., python -m venv .venv.
Install required packages with pip install -r requirements.txt.
Install Google’s Tesseract OCR engine and add its bin directory to the system PATH.
About Tesseract OCR
Tesseract is an open‑source OCR engine originally developed by HP in the 1980s, open‑sourced in 2005 and maintained by Google since 2006. It supports Unicode, over 100 languages, and multiple output formats (plain text, PDF, TSV). Version 4 incorporates deep‑learning‑based LSTM models for higher accuracy.
Before feeding images to Tesseract, applying preprocessing such as inversion, resizing, binarization, noise removal, deskewing, and border cropping (using OpenCV or NumPy) can greatly improve results.
Chinese OCR projects
Popular open‑source Chinese OCR includes chineseocr , which combines YOLO V3 and CRNN for scene text detection and recognition, and a lightweight fork chineseocr_lite (GitHub: https://github.com/ouyanghuiyu/chineseocr_lite).
These tools demonstrate how OCR can be extended to tasks like ID card or train ticket recognition, and even real‑time translation of printed text.
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Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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