GT Text

Text can be copied from one place to another without any effort, but if a paragraph is displayed as an image, you will have to transcribe it word by word. This is where GT Text comes in. The application is capable of extracting text from images, even if they are colored screenshots. Its functionality is straightforward and it should take only a few seconds to extract text from any type of image.

GT Text is absolutely free and it can be used on all popular Windows platforms. Its setup package is about 13 MB, which should not take long to download. Installing the application does not involve making any complex settings and it should not take more than a minute.

When launched, GT Text will ask you to select an image, on a standard Open dialog, but you can load an image later, on the main interface, if you want to. All you have to do is use a selection tool to draw a rectangle around the text you wish to extract. Once you select a piece of text, the application will extract it immediately and it will display it on a separate window. It is possible that GT Text will not extract the text accurately on the first try, but you may click a button to try again, until you are satisfied with the results. If the extracted text looks good, you can hit a different button, to copy the text to the clipboard.

The selection tool may not be so comfortable if you intend to extract a large body of text from a huge image. Fortunately, you don't need the selection tool in situations like this. The software can extract text from the entire image and all it takes is a single click. Furthermore, GT Text allows you to take snapshots of the screen, which are loaded on the same interface instantly. This particular feature can help you in many situations. For example, if the operating system displays an error message, which contains a long string of characters, you can take a snapshot, extract the text and send it to the clipboard, so you can paste the error message on Google, instead of transcribing letter by letter.