ScreenOCR is a simple front-end for the Tesseract OCR engine that allows you to convert images on your screen to text. ScreenOCR runs in the background, in your system tray. When you press a key combination, you can select any portion of the screen and have it copied as raw text to the clipboard.
Major uses include copying text from Google Books, locked PDFs, unprocessed scanned papers, and other hard-to-cite documents.
Note that OCR technologies are designed for large scanned documents, not small screen fonts, so the quality of the conversion won't be that great at normal viewing size. Zoom in a bit before converting for best quality. (ScreenOCR can convert most text from Google Books flawlessly if it's expanded.)
Download: ScreenOCR-v1.1-Setup.exe (1.58 MB) - requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or greater.
ScreenOCR-v1.1.zip (alternate ZIP version without installer)
© 2011 Daniel Gaskell. All rights reserved.