OCR from screenshot/Android UI (cross-app) integration

[Supaiku]

Is there a possibility that you will develop this feature? With a UI like Copy Paste It, but for Chinese of course!
It would be a major selling point for me. Reading PDFs without embedded characters, or images from inside a web browser...

Additionally, would it be possible to include a menu option to show a pop-up dictionary box, like in the text reader (great feature!) but cross applications. (like Copy Paste It is cross-app, but not just for images, but for text as well?

Great beta so far. Super functional
Glad to see it making it to Android.

 

[mikelove]

Is there a possibility that you will develop this feature? With a UI like Copy Paste It, but for Chinese of course!
It would be a major selling point for me. Reading PDFs without embedded characters, or images from inside a web browser...

I don't think it's actually possible to take a screenshot reliably except on a rooted phone... PDF reading we're already looking into, and we might even embed a web browser in-app at some point too (already do this on iOS), but taking images of other apps is going to be tricky.

Additionally, would it be possible to include a menu option to show a pop-up dictionary box, like in the text reader (great feature!) but cross applications. (like Copy Paste It is cross-app, but not just for images, but for text as well?

That one would definitely require a rooted phone, and quite a bit of hacking on our side to install the hook for that at a low enough level... theoretically possible but a massive challenge. We are hoping to get our new Clipboard Monitor feature to be usable in the next beta, which would provide some of the same functionality, though for right now it's pretty flaky.

 

[Supaiku]

I'm all about rooting
Look at the user base for apps requiring root (ie. Copy Paste It etc.) - I bet it's plenty large to make it worthwhile :mrgreen:

Reguardless, it's a great app already. These would just make it ultimate.

 

[mikelove]

I'm all about rooting
Look at the user base for apps requiring root (ie. Copy Paste It etc.) - I bet it's plenty large to make it worthwhile :mrgreen:

Well maybe we can think about it in a couple of releases, but it's not just the problem of requiring people to root their phones, it's that once we start hacking around with undocumented APIs nobody is even attempting to guarantee that things will work in a consistent way across all Android devices anymore; there's a reason most of the root-requiring apps are free and/or open-source, having to actually support something like that / provide bug fixes when it doesn't work on people's devices / etc is an absolute nightmare.

 

[Supaiku]

Understandable - regardless - for the time being copy-pasting should work. The few non-OCR PDFs I have I can just swap and hand-write the character, or bust out the paper-book and use photo-OCR for now.
Anyhow, thanks for considering it