My latest Mac utility is Aristocrat – its purpose is to simplify the process of optical character recognition on OS X.
Since starting University, I’ve often found myself wanting to quickly OCR small chunks of text. Whether these are the contents of slides from lecture videos or in PDFs that lack embedded text, it’s something that I’ve wanted to do frequently.
Aristocrat scratches this itch – it’s a simple menu bar application that allows you to select an area of your screen (optionally with global hotkeys) and uses the Tesseract OCR engine to recognize any text in the selected screen region. The recognized text can then be copied or sent to textual OS X Services.
Further, Aristocrat supports QR Codes (and other bar code types) so you’re able to decode such barcodes without having to take a photo of your screen with your phone.
It’s available now of the App Store – I hope you’ll find it useful.
