TextMan

Select, Detect, and Paste Text from Anywhere on Your Screen

Pay Once

Description

TextMan is a utility designed to address the common frustration of encountering text that cannot be selected or copied from various digital sources. It works seamlessly with websites, PDFs, images, videos, and even system user interfaces where text selection is typically restricted. The tool employs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology; users simply select a region of their screen, much like taking a screenshot, and TextMan processes the content within that area to identify and extract the text.

Once recognized, the extracted text is automatically placed onto the user's clipboard, making it instantly available to be pasted into any application or text field. A key feature of TextMan is its commitment to privacy, performing all text recognition processing locally on the user's device without sharing any data or utilizing tracking frameworks. It supports multiple languages including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (both simplified and traditional). Additional capabilities include displaying the scanned text in a floating overlay, utilizing macOS's text-to-speech function to read text aloud, initiating web searches with the captured text, and maintaining a history of scanned snippets for later use.

Key Features

Select Screen Region: Draw a rectangle to capture and OCR text from any part of the screen.
Multi-Language OCR: Recognizes English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (simplified/traditional).
Instant Clipboard Copy: Automatically copies recognized text to the clipboard.
Local Processing: Ensures privacy as all OCR processing happens on the user's device.
Floating Text Overlay: Displays the scanned text in a convenient overlay window.
Read Aloud (macOS): Leverages macOS text-to-speech to read captured text.
Integrated Web Search: Option to directly search the recognized text using a preferred search engine.
Scan History/Workflow: Keeps a list of recently scanned texts for easy access and reuse.
File Import: Convert text from imported image and PDF files.
Drag'n'Drop Text: Drag text directly from the preview into other applications.

Use Cases

Extracting text from websites with copy restrictions.
Copying text from non-selectable PDF documents.
Grabbing text content from images or screenshots.
Capturing text displayed within video content.
Copying text from system dialog boxes or error messages.
Quickly searching for text visible on the screen.
Collecting multiple text snippets from various on-screen sources into a workflow.