[IDEA] text recognition

[kalos]

hello!

there is often needed to translate, or explain, a word or text or even to see some associated text with a specific term (eg. see the list of specs for a specific part number)

to do this, we can create and maintain a database, in a simple text file, or csv or xls, that will match each term with an explanatory text or even weblinks or links to local files

but instead of copying the term, opening the database file, searching for it, etc, it would be nice to have this in a popup easily accessible

but often the term is not in an editable text, but it is displayed inside another GUI that it's not copiable

that's why, it would be nice to have a program that we will select the part of the screen that displays the term we want to look up, and the program will OCR it and then match it in the database and display the associated text in a popup!

that is easily be done I think and it would be nice!

thanks!

[sifu99]

I like that. Especially if it will handle scrollable window input.

[sifu99]

Even better, make the output database files (at user's option) public (at least to DC members).
Example, I'd love a database of
Excel regex snippets.
macros of various origins
ahk snippets (that work!)

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh Kalos,
You're shortly drifting into an old idea I had a few years ago. Depending on what your company is willing to spend a little on some of the stuff you are looking for, by now you have enough of these "medium-low-level" requests that it could be interesting if they could all begin to be batched into a couple of apps.

Until I ran out of money, I had the idea I would commission external programmers to start with a basic open source "shell" program. Mine happened to start with a word processor. Then the programmers began adding all kinds of custom power tools to it, to process text and do stuff. So then unlike Microsoft Word that just comes off a shelf and stays there, you get a legit core program (like a word processor) that then has things like "tools" menus that build in all the neat tricks you want.

[kalos]

well, I don't think of it as a MS Word's tool

because it should work independently, it should sit in the RAM and be triggered instantaneously, even we don't deal with text, as for example it should be able to capture text from a photo, etc

EDIT: sorry if you just mentioned it as example, and it's not relevant to this request

[IainB]

...that's why, it would be nice to have a program that we will select the part of the screen that displays the term we want to look up, and the program will OCR it and then match it in the database and display the associated text in a popup!

-kalos (April 01, 2015, 03:00 AM)

If that is your requirement, then you can effectively do that using MS OneNote, thus:

• Step 1: Press hotkey Win+Shift+S, which pops up the cross-hairs for image capture.
• Step 2: Drag the crosshairs to enclose the desired image area (including any text you want to capture), and then right-click the mouse. This captures the area into OneNote.
• Step 3: Alt-Tab to OneNote which automatically displays the page with the just-captured image. If you have set OneNote by default to automatically OCR any text in any image, then you can right-click the image and select the now OCRed text you are interested in. All the text in the image will be automatically indexed by OneNote and thus becomes searchable.

I made a post in the Clipboard Help+Spell discussion area about something similar to this: Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images.

If the reference database you want to query is in OneNote, then it would be very simple to search for any occurrence of the scanned (OCRed) string of characters in OneNote.
Otherwise, using (say) AHK, you could select the string and initiate it as a search in some other database, or on the Internet, or in the DC Forum.

[IainB]

Heh Kalos,
You're shortly drifting into an old idea I had a few years ago. Depending on what your company is willing to spend a little on some of the stuff you are looking for, by now you have enough of these "medium-low-level" requests that it could be interesting if they could all begin to be batched into a couple of apps.

Until I ran out of money, I had the idea I would commission external programmers to start with a basic open source "shell" program. Mine happened to start with a word processor. Then the programmers began adding all kinds of custom power tools to it, to process text and do stuff. So then unlike Microsoft Word that just comes off a shelf and stays there, you get a legit core program (like a word processor) that then has things like "tools" menus that build in all the neat tricks you want.

-TaoPhoenix (April 01, 2015, 05:06 AM)

Reminds me of Pathagoras - a really brilliantly useful documentation tool bolted-on to MS Word.