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Comment by idk1 | Hacker News Reader

One massive I'd add to this list that got added recently - being able to copy and paste text out of images. I'm so often sent a screenshot with a url in the url bar, I can now copy and paste that screenshot of a url. It's been massively the past month since I noticed it. Not sure how long it's been there, I assume not long, maybe last OS update.

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That is called Live Text and was introduced in Mac OS 12 Monterey. It is available for any app that uses the standard libraries to display images so you will see it in other apps, too, like Safari.

https://www.macworld.com/article/351669/macos-monterey-how-t...

It’s one of those transformative little features. But it’s especially great in PDFs where it’s not a “real” PDF but just a collection of page sized images so you couldn’t normally select the text before without OCR software of some sort.

Having it built into the OS is so handy.

I tried it with one of these image-based PDFs and didn't get it to work. Is this Apple-Silicon-only? Or is there any other step you need to do?

I’m not going to pretend it works 100% of the time. I don’t know if that’s the issue.

It works with anything that works with Monterey. So if you are running macOS Monterey you fit the requirements.

It is possible that it is AS only. It may use the machine learning components of AS.

Edit: As of July of 2021, Live Text was available in beta on Intel Macs so by the time Monterey shipped it worked on both Intel and AS.

Whether it works on a given document may depend on how that app displays the image. I can see where it would be complicated in a PDF where you may have combinations of text, images, and OCR’d text behind images.

Particularly useful for Twitter announcements on Twitter, where in order to say anything of value they have to tweet an image of some text.

To get this functionality everywhere, I’ve taken using the TRex app: https://github.com/amebalabs/TRex

I have it mapped to ctrl-alt-command-C. As more and more apps and webpages make text unselectable, it’s become invaluable. My favorite trick is to copy the URL when someone is screen sharing their browser in a virtual meeting!

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about TRex! I've been using TextSniper (https://textsniper.app) for this functionality -- not sure how these two compare, feature-wise.

And I didn't know about TextSniper. FWIW, TRex has only failed me less than 1 out of a hundred times, and only in edge cases like getting a crazy complicated URL from a tiny fuzzy web call. I also like that it's open source.

I really like how this works with alfred. Thanks!

Anybody know how to override this feature when you’re just trying to draw a selection rectangle over the image? The App keeps recognising the portion under my pointer as text and changing the pointer to a text selection caret instead.

iOS also recognizes text, and you can search your photo library from MacOS or iOS for text - a menu item or road sign you remember taking a picture of, for example.

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