Capture2Text is a free Windows program that provides you with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality. For those who did not understand, the app lets you highlight anything on your desktop to retrieve the text and copy it to the Windows clipboard.
Capture2Text works similarly to other free solutions such as Free OCR or Java-bsed JOCR, but is updated regularly and is fully compatible with all recent versions of Windows.
OCR functions are useful when you need to copy text that appears in images or other formats files which do not allow copying and editing of text.
The Capture2Text application is quite large (the exe is more than 60 Megabytes), but it does not need to be installed. You can simply run the exe from any computer Windows, as it is portable.
The program uses about 60 megabytes of memory when it runs.
The application highlights the text with an overlay on the screen and in a program window. You can edit the text directly from there, which is quite handy especially if OCR didn't recognize the characters correctly. The content it is automatically copied to the Clipboard from where you can edit it in any way you see fit.
Capture2Text supports several languages, and the default setting is English. However, other languages such as German, French, Japanese or Spanish can be found in the settings. The application also supports Greek.
In total there are 106 languages on the project page at SourceForge at this time.
Capture2Text supports automatic translation but you should enable it from the program options. If enabled, it will translate one recognized language to another using Google Translate.
Capture2Text is a powerful OCR software for Windows. It's a bit heavy on the memory side when it runs, but the OCR capabilities and the additional functionality it offers justify it.
Error rates in OCR are low.
Download the latest version from Sourceforge.net
