Screenshot OCR with BetterTouchTool on MacOS

btt-screenshot.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Usage:
# - Install `tesseract` with `brew install tesseract`
# - In BetterTouchTool, create a trigger of your choice.
#   (I recommend a Keyboard Shortcut with Cmd+Shift 6)
# - Add an Execute Shell Script / Task action
# - Paste this script.
# NOTE: You'll need to authorize BTT to the Screen Recording permission in Security and Privacy at System Preferences

# When using this quick script, it'll use MacOS' screencapture tool, use tesseract for OCR and then pass the scanned
# text to your clipboard using pbcopy.
screencapture -i /tmp/tesseract.png && /opt/homebrew/bin/tesseract --dpi 72 /tmp/tesseract.png stdout | tr -d \\f | pbcopy
PREVIEW=`pbpaste | head -n 3`

# A one liner snippet is also provided via a notification.
osascript -e "display notification \"${PREVIEW}...\" with title \"OCR captured to clipboard.\""

For better treatment of curly-quotes and other UNICODE, add LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to the "Environment Variables" box in BetterTouchTool

thanks! ill give it a try today. Thanks much appreciated