I personally don't understand why something that makes so much sense doesn't make its way into the operating systems. Or maybe there are some security concerns that I don't understand but the authors or creators of the systems do, but that doesn't change the fact that it's very convenient. What am I talking about? I am talking about the ability to copy text from whatever is on the screen. The ability to treat your screen as simply an image, and not a set of layers, half of which can't be copied, and then run OCR on that image and copy text. There are some other places where this feature exists. For instance, did you know there's a feature in Pixel Launcher's (Pixel Launcher is the default launcher in latest phones made by Google in the Pixel line-up) recents screen, since the recents screen has been a part of the launcher application. This has also led to great issues with third-party launchers since the system and the system launcher are so tightly integrated. 

Anyways. By the way you might think why did I wander off with something that was only slightly related to the topic of this blog post, that was because this is a blog post. It's not a quick how-to guide. So bear with me please.

It's so funny, now. This tool, or this service, let's say, because a lot of tools offer this service, is such a useful thing to have, but I don't see it in many people's desktops or laptops. When I am using my laptop and just very habitually copy text from a part of screen where it's generally not possible to copy text from, people get so surprised. And also, I feel I need to write this justification for this post because when I searched on Google and got many search results explaining the same thing, I felt discouraged to yet again write on the same thing, but then most people don't know that such a thing exists, so maybe it's not been written enough times.

The tool that I am going to talk about here is called ShareX and it's a wonderful tool. It's a shame that I am having to introduce you with this tool in this context, where I am going to tell you about its one function because it's one of the most feature rich tool I've ever used. It's primarily a screenshot utility, but it has other features like screen recording, screen recording as GIF, a URL shortener (this is how I've set it up to work: I press Ctrl+Shift+U and it opens a dialogue box with the copied URL that I have in my clipboard, I press enter and it replaces my clipboard content with the shortened URL), an OCR tool and much-much more! We're, however, just going to talk about the OCR tool.

Download & Setup ShareX

• Download and open ShareX from Microsoft Store 
• You'll see the following options in the left side of the tool:
  
  
• Go to "Hotkey settings..."
• Click on "Add" button, choose "Tools">"OCR" and then click on "Select a hotkey" button and press a combination of keys which you'd like to use to activate the OCR function. I personally use Ctrl+Shift+O since it's a combination that's usually unused by other applications and it's easy to remember.
• And you're done! Press Ctrl+Shift+O (or whichever keyboard shortcut you've set for yourself and select the part of the screen you want to extract text from!