Continuing off of my previous blog post about using LEADTOOLS OCR to save screenshots as searchable PDFs, this post demonstrates how to extract the text from those screenshots and store it back into your clipboard as plain text.

Like I said on the last blog post, developers can get images that have been copied to the clipboard using .NETs Clipboard Class. Instead of saving screenshots as searchable PDFs, this time we'll be using the GetText Method to retrieve text so we can store it back in the clipboard.

Low-resolution images can come from a variety of sources, but the most common source is probably screen capture. Screen capture images are usually 96 DPI on Windows. (This can vary depending on the user settings). Additionally, image representations of incoming faxes may also be considered low-res and fall under the resolution threshold acceptable for OCR. Typically, OCR engines require images of 200 or 300 DPI in order to achieve acceptable results.

Change Image Resolution

One easy solution for images that do not have noise or have complex structures is to change the resolution of the image before OCRing the image. This C# sample shows you how, then it gets the text from the image and outputs it to the console.

Last year, as part of our 25 projects in 25 days, we created a MeteorJS app to perform OCR using the LEADTOOLS web services.

LEADTOOLS provides fast and highly accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) SDK technology for .NET (C# & VB), C/C++, WinRT, iOS, OS X, Java, and web. Developers around the world are leveraging the LEADTOOLS SDK to add high-performance OCR and document processing to their applications across all of the platforms in their enterprise, including server, desktop, and mobile devices.

OCR is a very processor intensive process, so native OCR on servers and desktops is expected. But, did you know that LEADTOOLS OCR also runs natively on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS? To test the performance of LEADTOOLS OCR on your our device, we have created several applications and put them in the respective app stores. These apps can OCR images stored on the device or taken with the camera in order to extract text or convert to a text based document format such as PDF or DOC.
Features include:

Continuing off our last white paper about end-to-end eDiscovery with LEADTOOLS Document Imaging, this post will go over a .NET Core console application that performs OCR on each PDF from a given directory while searching for a given word in those PDFs. This application is optimized to handle both raster images and documents, so feel free to change the code around to search more than PDFs. If the word the user submits is found within a file in the directory, the file name containing the searched word will be logged out to the console.