03 / Compare
Ways to copy screen text.
These tools have different entry points. Here are the workflows their own documentation describes—not a ranking of speed, accuracy or price.
ClipOCR
From a menu-bar or tray utility, select a region; local Apple Vision, Windows.Media.Ocr or Tesseract recognises the text and copies it to the clipboard. One Tauri/Rust codebase serves macOS 12+, Windows 11 and wlroots/Wayland Linux. No account, cloud OCR, capture history or app sync; MIT licensed. The optional update check is off by default.
Platform details →Live Text
Apple documents selecting and copying text from an image opened in Preview. Check Apple's documentation for other Live Text contexts and availability.
Apple's Preview guide ↗PowerToys Text Extractor
Microsoft documents a screen-region overlay: press the default Win+Shift+T, drag across text, and the result goes to the clipboard. OCR language availability depends on installed language packs; check Microsoft's documentation for current requirements.
Microsoft's Text Extractor guide ↗TextSniper
The vendor describes choosing an area of the Mac screen and copying recognised text to the clipboard, including text in images, PDFs and video. Its documented shortcut is Cmd+Shift+2. Check the vendor's page for current features and licensing.
TextSniper's website ↗Comparison scope: documented capture and clipboard workflows only. No independent speed, accuracy, privacy or price comparison is implied. External links open vendor pages; they are not site assets or browser-loaded dependencies.