dpScreenOCR is a free, open-source, and cross-platform optical character recognition tool with support for more than 100 languages.
dpScreenOCR works is like this: you select an area on the screen using a keyboard shortcut, and then text from that area is extracted and, depending on your choice, can be copied to the clipboard, saved to the history, or sent to another application (e.g. dictionary/translator). In most cases, you don't even have to interact with the GUI, and the program can reside in the system tray.
The biggest changes since the program (v1.1.0) was mentioned in HN[1] in 2022 include:
* Added a language manager that allows you to install and remove languages without leaving the application. Previously, you had to manually download the language files and place them in special directories.
* Added a stand-alone GNU/Linux bundle (in a TAR.XZ archive), which should work even on legacy systems released in around mid-2014 or later (tested on Ubuntu 14.04).
* Fixed recognition with vertical variants of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
* Added proper selection rectangle scaling according to the screen DPI. The width of the rectangle can now also be configured (as requested by @Lakuma in [1] :).
* Thanks to contributors, the website has been translated into several languages. Some languages are still to be added, so help with translation would be greatly appreciated: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/dpscreenocr/
dpScreenOCR works is like this: you select an area on the screen using a keyboard shortcut, and then text from that area is extracted and, depending on your choice, can be copied to the clipboard, saved to the history, or sent to another application (e.g. dictionary/translator). In most cases, you don't even have to interact with the GUI, and the program can reside in the system tray.
The biggest changes since the program (v1.1.0) was mentioned in HN[1] in 2022 include:
* Added a language manager that allows you to install and remove languages without leaving the application. Previously, you had to manually download the language files and place them in special directories.
* Added a stand-alone GNU/Linux bundle (in a TAR.XZ archive), which should work even on legacy systems released in around mid-2014 or later (tested on Ubuntu 14.04).
* Fixed recognition with vertical variants of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
* Added proper selection rectangle scaling according to the screen DPI. The width of the rectangle can now also be configured (as requested by @Lakuma in [1] :).
* Thanks to contributors, the website has been translated into several languages. Some languages are still to be added, so help with translation would be greatly appreciated: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/dpscreenocr/
The full list of changes since v1.1.0 can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danpla/dpscreenocr/v1.4.1/...
The source code (zlib license) is available on GitHub: https://github.com/danpla/dpscreenocr
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32123437