OCR Capture
Extract text from any area of your screen with one hotkey.

Press Ctrl+Alt+O, draw a region, and the recognized text is copied to your clipboard instantly. No separate app needed — OCR is built in.
How to use it
- Press Ctrl+Alt+O (or click the OCR button in the Captures ribbon).
- The screen dims and the region selector opens in OCR mode.
- Drag to select the area containing text.
- Release — the text is extracted and copied to your clipboard.
- A toast confirms how many characters were found.
- The extracted text is also saved automatically as a Clip in your clipboard history (source shown as “Blue Synergy · OCR”).
Hold Shift while releasing to toggle the “save image” setting for that capture: if saving is normally off, Shift saves it; if it’s normally on, Shift skips it.
OCR mode vs. regular capture
| Region Capture | OCR Capture | |
|---|---|---|
| Result | Screenshot saved | Text copied to clipboard |
| Preview punch-through | Yes | No |
| Dimension label | Yes | No |
| Info panel | Visible | Hidden (press H to show) |
Tips & gotchas
- OCR needs the English language pack (bundled). For other languages, download the pack from Settings → Captures → OCR → Lang dropdown.
- If no text is found, the clipboard is not overwritten.
- The OCR engine (Tesseract) is bundled with Blue Synergy — no separate installation needed.
- Auto-detection: If OCR has never been configured, Blue Synergy checks for Tesseract at startup and enables or disables it automatically. A toast appears if Tesseract is not found so you know why OCR is unavailable.
- Extracted OCR text is always saved as a Clip in your history — useful if you close the window before using the text.
Configuration
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Auto-detect | Enable OCR Capture (auto-detected on first run) |
| Language | English | Language for text recognition |
| Save image | Off | Also save the captured region as a screenshot |
| Hotkey | Ctrl+Alt+O |
Global shortcut |
Find these under Settings → Captures → OCR.
See also
- OCR Language Packs — download language packs
- OCR Feedback — what the result toasts mean