ABBYY Screenshot Reader free Christmas promotion.

Posted by dan7000
Dec 14, 2011 at 07:17 PM

Thanks for the tip - I’ve been looking for something like this.

For those wondering what the big deal is: This software does OCR of screen captures. Most screen grabbing programs just capture text or images, but don’t do OCR. Some programs claim to convert windows to editable text, but really they only work on dialog boxes or other windows that have unselectable text—they do not do OCR on images.

I need this all the time, because I regularly copy text from PDFs with columns. Unfortunately, the built-in OCR in Acrobat does not deal with columns well, so if you rely on the native OCR you often cannot select text from just one column - you end up with lines from both columns interspersed with one another.

ABBYY software does a great job of letting me select any rectangular area of the screen - including a column in a PDF - and OCRing it on the spot before dumping the text into the clipboard. Very nice. The only thing I would add is a global hotkey, which seems to be missing - currently I have to right-click on the system tray before I can capture anything.