TextSniper

TextSniper is an award-winning, highly useful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) utility app designed exclusively for macOS. It allows users to quickly and easily extract and recognize text from any non-selectable area on their screen—acting essentially like a screenshot tool just for text.

It's a huge productivity booster for anyone who needs to quickly grab text from sources they can't normally copy and paste from.

Key Features

TextSniper's main advantage is its simplicity, speed, and privacy:

Capture from Any Source: Instantly captures non-selectable text from virtually anything displayed on your screen, including:

• Images, infographics, and photos.
• Non-searchable PDF documents and locked PDFs.
• Zoom meetings, presentations, and video content (YouTube, online courses).
• Protected web articles and ebooks.

• On-Device OCR (Privacy): The text recognition process is performed offline and entirely on your Mac. It does not send any screenshots or data to external servers, ensuring user privacy and requiring no internet connection to function.

• Instant Clipboard Copy: After you select the area, the recognized text is instantly copied to your clipboard, ready to be pasted into any text editor or document.

• Multi-Language Support: The number of supported languages has increased over time and depends on your macOS version (English is supported on all, with many other languages added in Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, and Sonoma).

• Text-to-Speech: Includes a feature to have the recognized text read aloud, which is useful for proofreading or accessibility.

• QR Code and Barcode Reader: It can instantly scan and convert QR codes and barcodes displayed on the screen into readable text.

• Customizable Shortcut: The capture function can be triggered with a simple, customizable keyboard shortcut (often defaulting to $\text{CMD} + \text{Shift} + 2$), making it feel as fast as a built-in macOS tool.