Extracteract
I kept needing to copy text from screenshots—JIRA tickets, PDFs, and images. Cameras have had OCR for years. Why doesn't everything else? On Mac the situation is worse—Apple controls everything. Here's a minimal script using Tesseract OCR. I use it for JIRA tickets and other places where I need quick text extraction. You can run this program anywhere you have Python and Tesseract installed (installer included!).
I kept needing to copy text from screenshots—JIRA tickets, PDFs, scanned documents. Cameras have had OCR for years. Why doesn't my Mac—where Apple controls literally everything—have such functionality built in?
Here's what it takes to fix it yourself:
# Install once
./install-deps.sh
# Use anywhere
./extracteract.sh input.pdf
./extracteract.sh screenshot.png
The install script handles macOS, Linux, and Windows. The extraction script handles PDFs, images, language detection, and DPI settings. I use it daily for JIRA tickets and anywhere I need quick text extraction.
One line to install. One line to run. That's all it takes to do what Apple won't.
GitHub: extracteract