Usage

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

Quickstart

1. Start NormCap and wait until a pink border appears.
2. Select a region on the screen with your mouse.
   Then wait for a notification or a pink tray icon to appear to indicate, that the processing finished.
3. The detected text gets copied into your system clipboard, paste it into any application.
4. Use the menu ⚙ in the top right corner to adjust settings.

Example use-cases

• Extract text from screenshots you received via mail.
• Copy error messages from non-selectable UI elements.
• Retrieve information from photos.
• Capture mail addresses from "crawler safe" images on the web.

User Interface

• The settings can be accessed via the ⚙-icon in the top right.
• In the settings, you can adjust the language(s) you are trying to recognize, which is important for a good accuracy.
• The icons ★ or ☰ next to the selection-rectangle indicate the active "capture mode" (see below).
• To abort a capture or quit NormCap press <esc>

Capture Modes

The settings menu ⚙ allows switching between the two capture modes: "parse" and "raw":

• "Raw"-Mode

  Marked by the ☰ symbol, it returns text just as detected by the OCR software. For example, all line-breaks are preserved.

• "Parse"-Mode (default)

  Indicated by the ★ symbol, it performs some formatting of the output based on certain implemented rules, which can take additional information like text position and content into account. In a first step, every rule calculates a "score" to determine the likelihood of being responsible for this type of text. In a 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:

  Heuristics performed in parse-mode:

  Rule name	Score heuristics	Transform
  Single line	Only single line is detected	Trim unnecessary whitespace
  Multi line	Multiple lines, but single paragraph	Separate using line breaks and trim unnecessary whitespace in each line
  Paragraph	Multiple blocks of lines or multiple paragraphs	Join every paragraph into a single line, separate different paragraphs by empty line
  E-Mail	Number of chars in email addresses vs. overall chars	Transform to a comma-separated list of email addresses
  URL	Number of chars in URLs vs. overall chars	Transform to line-break separated URLs, discard all other characters.