A new tool from Microsoft to extract any text from images on Windows

 A new tool from Microsoft to extract any text from images on Windows

Sometimes it can be annoying to search for a specific text that you want for a purpose but instead find an image with only the text in it, or the text is copy-protected and cannot be selected, or you find some text inside a video or PDF file and the only solution is to retype it on the keyboard, which is easy if the text is short, but if you are busy preparing a research episode or you want speed and the text is long, you can use one of the OCR tools available for free, which recognizes the characters from the image and then extracts them in the form of plain text that can be copied.

We have already reviewed many forms of these tools, whether by installing a program on the computer, adding them to the browser, or accessing them through a website on the Internet, and today we highlight the new Text Extractor tool from Microsoft to perform this purpose specifically.

Microsoft's PowerToys is definitely a well-known program that offers a host of helpful features to increase productivity or add more customization to the user interface. Personally, I consider it to be one of Microsoft's most powerful and best tools as a "means" to improve the way we use Windows on a daily basis. Through this tool, it is possible to perform many tasks, such as changing the functions of keyboard buttons, launching programs quickly, organizing open windows of equal sizes in a manner similar to the Snap Layouts feature in Windows 11, adjusting the dimensions of a batch of images with one click, or knowing what prevents deletion or modifies the file.

There are a large number of tools included in the program, and more are constantly being added. In fact, the Text Extractor tool that we are highlighting in this article is part of the v0.62.0 update that arrived a short time ago for the program. Simply put, Text Extractor is an add-on for Windows whose goal is to make it easy to quickly extract text from images, whether it's a screenshot from a video, part of a PDF file, or generally any image containing text. You can instantly extract it with the press of a button. What is unique about this tool is that you do not need an internet connection to extract the text, as it does the processing locally thanks to its reliance on another tool called Text Grab.

The Text Extractor tool can extract text from images in any language. However, when you run the tool, you will only recognize the text if it is in English. If you want to extract text in Arabic, here you will need to make sure to download the Arabic language package on the Windows system. To do this, open the Settings application on Windows 10 or 11 by pressing the Win + I keys together, then go to the "Time & Language" section, and there press Language. On the next screen, click on the name of the Arabic language under the "Preferred languages" section, then select Options (in Windows 11, press the menu button () in front of the language name, then select "Language options"), and then click on the Download button in the section for the language pack.

After making sure you have the Arabic language pack downloaded, you need to download the Arabic OCR package, which will allow Text Extractor to easily recognize Arabic characters. To do this, open the PowerShell tool or the Terminal application in Windows from the menu that appears after pressing the Win and X keys together. On the command prompt screen, type the following command:

$Capability = Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object { $_.Name -Like 'Language.OCR*ar-SA*' }

After pressing Enter to execute the previous command, paste the following command and press Enter to download the Arabic OCR package:

$Capability | Add-WindowsCapability -Online

How to use the Text Extractor tool

All you need to get started is to install the PowerToys program on your device, either through the Microsoft Store or by downloading the EXE file from the Microsoft site for manual installation, then run the program and select the Text Extractor tool from the side menu and activate it by activating the "Enable Text Extractor" button, as shown in In the attached image, a notification will appear informing you that the tool only works with languages for which the OCR package is installed, and therefore it is necessary to take the steps described in the previous paragraphs.

After activating the tool, scroll down, and the keyboard shortcut for running the Text Extractor will appear within the Activation Shortcuts section. By default, it will be Win + Shift + T, but you can change it if you want. Just click on the pen icon and press the keys you want to use as a shortcut, then press Save. After that, click on the Preferred Language menu and select the language of the text to be extracted from the image.

Now, open the image from which you want to extract the text. For example, here we have a normal image with clear text for the tests, but the tool is powerful and can recognize the text even if the image quality is bad. Anyway, to extract the text, press Win + Shift + T and select the area on the image from which you want to extract the text.

Text Extractor will automatically recognize the text and copy it to the clipboard, so just press Ctrl + V to paste this text anywhere, be it an input field, Notepad, or your favorite text editor. The text will be copied from the image to the text file with near-perfect accuracy, since the tool also copies the formatting of the text itself. For example, if you want to extract lines of code from a video, when you make a paste, the lines are pasted in the same order as they were in the video.