Several months prior to intro of latest Mac OS (Monterrey), I thought I saw something indicating a new OCR to be baked into the Monterrey OS, but I've not been able to find same. Did I dream this? Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you.
Mac mini 2018 or later
It works on images in Safari that have text in them.
I was able to select the text in this screenshot in a user tip and drag an save it as a text clipping.
What you read may have been referring to the Live Text feature, which is a form of OCR. Hard to say what you may have read of course.
Preview in macOS Monterey introduces Live Text which allows you to select and copy/paste text from an image.
NeilKo wrote:
That is likely what I saw and waited for. Sadly, I just tried it on a scanned .png image for which I was waiting to OCR, and I cannot yet get it to work.
It's tricky. It probably won't work in any app that already has copy and paste functionality for image data. I just checked with an image PDF from my e-mail. Inside mail, I can select the OCR'ed text from the PDF. But if I open the PDF in Preview, it is just an image with nothing else. I tried to open the PDF in Safari too, but that didn't work for me.
Make like it is 1996 again and e-mail the file to yourself. See if that works.
etresoft wrote:
dialabrain wrote:
FWIW, Live Text will not work on an image that is saved as a PDF. It has to be an image format.
That seems true for Preview, but not for Mail.
Okay. I guess I should have said Live Text doesn't work on images that are saved as PDFs on any of my Macs running Monterey.
dialabrain wrote:
Okay. I guess I should have said Live Text doesn't work on images that are saved as PDFs on any of my Macs running Monterey.
To be most accurate, just say that Live Text works wherever it is supported. Mail is rendering the PDF as an image when it displays it inline. That enables Mail's Live Text to kick in and recognize it. Preview also has to render the PDF as an image to display it, but it uses different logic that does not enable Live Text. There is no technical reason why Preview couldn't do this.
NeilKo wrote:
That is likely what I saw and waited for. Sadly, I just tried it on a scanned .png image for which I was waiting to OCR, and I cannot yet get it to work.
FWIW, Live Text can be a little fussy at times. I saved a PDF as a .png @ 72ppi & 144ppi. Live Text recognized all the text of the 144ppi copy but not the smaller text of the 72ppi copy.
dialabrain wrote:
FWIW, Live Text will not work on an image that is saved as a PDF. It has to be an image format.
That seems true for Preview, but not for Mail.
etresoft wrote:
But if I open the PDF in Preview, it is just an image with nothing else. I tried to open the PDF in Safari too, but that didn't work for me.
FWIW, Live Text will not work on an image that is saved as a PDF. It has to be an image format.
I have a 72-DPI PNG image residing on Monterey 12.0.1:
I can select the first cell of the image scaled at 100% by triple-clicking the text, and copy/paste that into Pages v11.2 on Monterey 12.0.1, arriving in the default Pages font and text size. Note that the Live Text result when pasted into Pages (or LibreOffice Writer 7.2.2) does not conform to the original image text, as the first v is promoted to upper-case, so be prepared to verify the result:
However, I cannot select the text from a PDF whose content was scanned by VueScan Professional v9.7.67 on Monterey 12.0.1. Unless I missed something, the Live Text page from my previous Preview User Guide link did not mention its capability with PDF documents.
You're welcome.
FWIW, Live Text also works in Safari.
::smh:: Exactly what I said, Live Text only works on images.
That is likely what I saw and waited for. Sadly, I just tried it on a scanned .png image for which I was waiting to OCR, and I cannot yet get it to work. I'll try again, though. Thanks to both you and DialaBrain.
Aha, you may be correct at that. Thanks.
Excellent! I'll give it a go with alternative saves.
Apple OS OCR
