Windows Freeware Guide: Capture2Text - Extract Text from Screen FREE on Windows 11

Quality of screenshots depends on quality of the display, so the test results you will see in this article may vary on other computers. This freeware takes a screenshot and copy the extracted text to the clipboard, users can take benefits of that.

The test steps - Capture2Text 4.6.2
OS: Windows 11 Home
Download from developer's website
https://sourceforge.net/projects/capture2text/files/Capture2Text/

1. Download zip file and extract and copy its contents.

2. I created the folder 'Capture2Text' in C:\Program Files

And pasted to that folder, then opened file 'Capture2Text', the 'welcome' dialog box appeared. You can read the instructions from this dialog box.

3. From the picture above, click the arrow at taskbar, right click at the app icon, go to settings.

Set hotkey: start OCR capture, I unchecked the rest of hotkeys. The problem occurred when I pressed 'Windows' key and searched at the box, typing letter 'o' brought the label 'Vertical' 'Horizontal' 'Auto' at the bottom-right corner.

I selected 'Unmapped' for that hotkey, the problem was fixed. But on the way of testing, there was a problem on one of the hotkeys that I unchecked, so I decided to select 'Unmapped' to all hotkeys I unchecked.

4. Set current OCR language at 'OCR1' section, I set to 'English'.

5. I located mouse pointer to the corner to the desired area, pressed hotkey (Windows + Q), drag to create the rectangle area.

You can move that area by holding right click button and move the pointer. To cancel, press 'Esc'. To accept that area, just click the mouse.

The extracted text was shown in the dialog box (picture above), the result was unacceptable.

From the picture below, the result was OK.

I clicked 'OK' button on the dialog box (picture above), this action sent the the extracted text to the clipboard. It was ready to paste to other applications.