Usage

A short guide for using NormCap and its most important features.

Quickstart

1. Start NormCap and wait for the pink border to appear.
2. Select a screen region with your mouse and wait for the notification or pink tray icon.
3. Paste the detected text from your clipboard into any application.
4. Access settings via the ⚙ menu in the top right corner.

User Interface

• Access settings via the ⚙ icon in the top right of your primary monitor.
• Adjust recognition language(s) in settings for better accuracy.
• The icons ★ or ☰ next to the selection rectangle indicate "Parse Text" status (see below).
• Press <esc> to abort capture or quit NormCap.

Detection settings

The settings menu ⚙ allows toggling various detection modes:

"Detection"

• Text

  Extracts text from the selected area.

• QR & Barcodes

  Detects and decodes QR codes and barcodes in the selected area. Data from multiple codes are separated by newlines.

Info

When both "Text" and "QR & Barcode" are active, "QR & Barcode" takes priority: if a code is found, text detection is skipped.

"Post-Processing"

• Parse Text

  When active, the selection rectangle gets marked with a ★ symbol. This mode performs some formatting of the output based on certain implemented rules, which can take additional information like text position and content into account. In the first step, every rule calculates a "score" to determine the likelihood of being responsible for this type of text. In the second step, the rule which achieved the highest "score" takes the necessary actions to "transform" the input text according to its type. The following rules are currently implemented:

  Rule name	Score heuristics	Transform
  Single line	Only single line detected	Trim unnecessary whitespace
  Multi line	Multiple lines, single paragraph	Separate with line breaks, trim whitespace per line
  Paragraph	Multiple line blocks or paragraphs	Join paragraphs into single lines, separate with empty lines
  Email	Email address chars vs. total chars	Transform to comma-separated email list
  URL	URL chars vs. total chars	Transform to newline-separated URLs, discard other characters

Exemplary use cases

• Extract text from screenshots you received via email.
• Copy error messages from non-selectable UI elements.
• Retrieve information from photos.
• Capture email addresses from "crawler safe" images on the web.
• Scan QR codes in livestreams or online presentations.
• Read barcodes from product pictures.
• ... and many more!