Text recognition in Spectacle?

Offtopic
1

I know that this is probably the wrong forum to ask, yet there are so many knowledgeable people around here, I think it is worth a try. So here goes:

Browsing the latest announcement on KDE Plasma, I learned that Spectacle apparently gained the ability to extract text from a screenshot.

But I can’t see that “Extact Text” menu entry in my currently installed Spectacle.

All I get is Accept | Cancel | Save | Save As | Copy | Export

╰─> pacman -Qi spectacle
Installed From  : cachyos-extra-znver4
Name            : spectacle
Version         : 1:6.6.1-1.1

Unfortunately, the announcement does not say which version of Spectacle would have this feature :frowning:

Any idea?

2

You need this:
sudo pacman -Syu tesseract

3

Hey thanks! This gives me a list of 128 “providers for tessdata”:

Full list 
resolving dependencies...
:: There are 128 providers available for tessdata:
:: Repository extra
   1) tesseract-data-afr  2) tesseract-data-amh  3) tesseract-data-ara  4) tesseract-data-asm
   5) tesseract-data-aze  6) tesseract-data-aze_cyrl  7) tesseract-data-bel  8) tesseract-data-ben
   9) tesseract-data-bod  10) tesseract-data-bos  11) tesseract-data-bre  12) tesseract-data-bul
   13) tesseract-data-cat  14) tesseract-data-ceb  15) tesseract-data-ces  16) tesseract-data-chi_sim
   17) tesseract-data-chi_sim_vert  18) tesseract-data-chi_tra  19) tesseract-data-chi_tra_vert
   20) tesseract-data-chr  21) tesseract-data-cos  22) tesseract-data-cym  23) tesseract-data-dan
   24) tesseract-data-dan_frak  25) tesseract-data-deu  26) tesseract-data-deu_frak  27) tesseract-data-div
   28) tesseract-data-dzo  29) tesseract-data-ell  30) tesseract-data-eng  31) tesseract-data-enm
   32) tesseract-data-epo  33) tesseract-data-equ  34) tesseract-data-est  35) tesseract-data-eus
   36) tesseract-data-fao  37) tesseract-data-fas  38) tesseract-data-fil  39) tesseract-data-fin
   40) tesseract-data-fra  41) tesseract-data-frk  42) tesseract-data-frm  43) tesseract-data-fry
   44) tesseract-data-gla  45) tesseract-data-gle  46) tesseract-data-glg  47) tesseract-data-grc
   48) tesseract-data-guj  49) tesseract-data-hat  50) tesseract-data-heb  51) tesseract-data-hin
   52) tesseract-data-hrv  53) tesseract-data-hun  54) tesseract-data-hye  55) tesseract-data-iku
   56) tesseract-data-ind  57) tesseract-data-isl  58) tesseract-data-ita  59) tesseract-data-ita_old
   60) tesseract-data-jav  61) tesseract-data-jpn  62) tesseract-data-jpn_vert  63) tesseract-data-kan
   64) tesseract-data-kat  65) tesseract-data-kat_old  66) tesseract-data-kaz  67) tesseract-data-khm
   68) tesseract-data-kir  69) tesseract-data-kmr  70) tesseract-data-kor  71) tesseract-data-kor_vert
   72) tesseract-data-lao  73) tesseract-data-lat  74) tesseract-data-lav  75) tesseract-data-lit
   76) tesseract-data-ltz  77) tesseract-data-mal  78) tesseract-data-mar  79) tesseract-data-mkd
   80) tesseract-data-mlt  81) tesseract-data-mon  82) tesseract-data-mri  83) tesseract-data-msa
   84) tesseract-data-mya  85) tesseract-data-nep  86) tesseract-data-nld  87) tesseract-data-nor
   88) tesseract-data-oci  89) tesseract-data-ori  90) tesseract-data-pan  91) tesseract-data-pol
   92) tesseract-data-por  93) tesseract-data-pus  94) tesseract-data-que  95) tesseract-data-ron
   96) tesseract-data-rus  97) tesseract-data-san  98) tesseract-data-sin  99) tesseract-data-slk
   100) tesseract-data-slk_frak  101) tesseract-data-slv  102) tesseract-data-snd  103) tesseract-data-spa
   104) tesseract-data-spa_old  105) tesseract-data-sqi  106) tesseract-data-srp
   107) tesseract-data-srp_latn  108) tesseract-data-sun  109) tesseract-data-swa  110) tesseract-data-swe
   111) tesseract-data-syr  112) tesseract-data-tam  113) tesseract-data-tat  114) tesseract-data-tel
   115) tesseract-data-tgk  116) tesseract-data-tgl  117) tesseract-data-tha  118) tesseract-data-tir
   119) tesseract-data-ton  120) tesseract-data-tur  121) tesseract-data-uig  122) tesseract-data-ukr
   123) tesseract-data-urd  124) tesseract-data-uzb  125) tesseract-data-uzb_cyrl  126) tesseract-data-vie
   127) tesseract-data-yid  128) tesseract-data-yor

Now I wonder which one to use? Given the fact that I have both english and german texts here… tesseract-data-eng is a no-brainer, but will it then also recognize german texts?

Sorry for my newbie questions…

4

sudo pacman -Syu tesseract-data-eng tesseract-data-deu

5

Thanks! This worked and I have the “Extract Text” button here but… the whole this is a bit flaky. Not because of your guidance, that’s spot-on, but the whole feature seems a bit unpolished to me.

At first, “Extract Text” just did a screenshot. Nothing else.

So I poked around in the settings and there I saw:

After taking a screenshot:
:check_box_with_check: Save file to default folder
Copy image to clipboard

Which I love. But apparently that “Copy image to clipboard” conflicts with the OCR functionality that also wants to add the text to the clipboard. :person_facepalming:

Oh well. I guess I will just have to remember that setting for whenever I want to extract text from a screenshot.

So: thanks again! :+1: