Add another one to the kitty! PowerToys continues to grow rapidly as a toolkit. We recently learned that Microsoft is adding a Screen Ruler utility to the application, and now there’s more.
The company and the open-source community are busy preparing an OCR tool for PowerToys.
Most of you should be aware of the Optical Character Recognition technology.
Such capabilities exist on a system level in other operating systems like Android and iOS. The latter, for example, can already grab text from any picture, and the upcoming iOS 16 release will extend these capabilities to videos.
According to this pull request in the GitHub repository, PowerOCR is now in development.
This new ability will enable users to extract text from images. It supports copying text from a rectangular region, clicking a word, or right-clicking any image file. You just need to select the text you want to extract from an image, and PowerToys will do its magic.
The GIF below shows these handy new capabilities in action:
At first glance, it seems to work pretty well.
But obviously, it remains to be seen how this new feature will handle other fonts and documents where the text is not as clearly visible as in the demo. The true test of these capabilities will come with scanned documents, which is what most OCR apps struggle with.
That said, PowerOCR is in its early stages right now. Developers have a lot of work to do before they can ship the tool to the public.
You know what to do if you want to help with its development.
Nevertheless, it will be a fantastic addition to PowerToys. The availability of other OCR solutions and third-party apps withstanding. They may offer additional features and capabilities, but having these abilities in a toolset like PowerToys is always welcome.