NormCap — The Complete Guide: A Screenshot Tool That Captures Text, Not Images
NormCap looks like a screenshot tool, but the result is text instead of an image. You mark an area and the text in it is recognised and copied straight to the clipboard. It is handy when you need a value from a locked PDF, a presentation, an image or a design-program window that does not allow copying.
NormCap
dynobo
A screenshot tool that captures text instead of images — mark an area and the text goes to the clipboard.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Local OCR — recognition with Tesseract, with no data sent anywhere.
- Many languages — choose the recognition language for the document.
- QR codes and barcodes — read directly from the screen.
- Link and email detection — addresses recognised as links.
- Multiple monitors — works across several displays.
What to know
Accuracy depends on the quality and size of the text on screen — zoom in before marking, and check any numbers before using them in a calculation. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux under the GPL-3.0 licence.
Related tools
A Windows alternative with a table view — Text Grab. The engine itself — Tesseract OCR. For ordinary screenshots — Flameshot.
Text Grab
Joseph Finney
A Windows screen-OCR tool — copies text and tables from screenshots, images and windows, all locally.
Get it from the vendor
Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR project
The open OCR engine behind many tools — turns scans into text in more than 100 languages.
Get it from the vendor
Flameshot
Flameshot project
Cross-platform screenshots with in-place markup — arrows, text, blur and numbering, ideal for marking up drawings.
Get it from the vendorShareX
ShareX team
Screenshots and screen recording for Windows — annotate with arrows and labels, and extract text with OCR.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Instead of retyping numbers from an image, mark and paste. Small, private and free.