I just discovered the most amazing thing!
Java finally lets you layer "invisible" windows on top of other windows.
I can finally draw things over other windows outside of the normal Java
frame.

I came up with this contraption today, "Window Reader",
and it's still warm from the compiler.
.
The idea is you press a hotkey (CTRL-R) to activate the program.
Next you drag a box around some text on your screen.
Then that area of text gets pushed through an OCR engine,
All the pixels in that window will try to be optically recognized into text.
The results of the text scan are popped up in a new window.

This way you can cut and paste text from images that can't normally get
cut/pasted.

Windows Only! Needs the newest version of Java(7). http://java.com
Let me know how it works for you, fellow software testers.

INSTALLATION / USAGE
1. download and unzip
file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19401902/WindowReader.zip
2. Start WindowReader.jar (double-click, or  "java -jar WindowReader.jar")
3. Press CTRL-R and then select a rectangle of text anywhere on your screen
to read.
(you will see a red border around your screen, and blue words where the
mouse is)
4. Wait for it! Large areas can take a few seconds to process.
5. The new popup window will show the OCR text.
6. Repeat step 3 until:
7. You press CTRL-Q to quit.

holy handy software bro!

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Paul Klemstine <paulklemst...@gmail.com>wrote:

keen... Is that a windows only feature per the java documentation or is it
just that you've not tried it under Linux... ( I can't remember what your
primary dev environment is...)

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Karl P. Niemuth II
<bithead.1...@gmail.com>wrote:

The jar includes the OCR engine(Tesseract) as Windows x86 DLL files, but it
seems to run fine on Windows 7 x64.
This could easily be recompiled to use the Linux build of the OCR engine.
But I'm probably not going to do that any time soon.
License is Apache Version 2, so I don't know, could I sell this?

The OCR engine is Apache Version 2?

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

yes.  while of course I am not a lawyer, I believe that you can charge for
it.

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
see the section on "Derivative Work"

linking to this library is not considered a derivative work, but I do not
believe that the apache licenses are considered "viral" so your part does
not have to be distributed as open source.

Mark

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Paul Klemstine <paulklemst...@gmail.com>wrote:

Interesting. I noticed a lot of text gets mangled by the ocr engine,
particularly with punctuation such as web addresses.

And sometimes I'd prefer to use a mouse context menu to copy, rather than
ctrl-c, but overall, pretty cool.

How do you create the layered window, and is it just reading the systems
graphics context?

From: dhmn-discussion@googlegroups.com
[mailto:dhmn-discussion@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mark Nickel
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:02 PM
To: dhmn-discussion@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: {DHMN-discussion} Java project of the day - Window Reader - OCR

The OCR engine is Apache Version 2?

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

yes.  while of course I am not a lawyer, I believe that you can charge for
it.

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

see the section on "Derivative Work"

linking to this library is not considered a derivative work, but I do not
believe that the apache licenses are considered "viral" so your part does
not have to be distributed as open source.

Mark

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Paul Klemstine <paulklemst...@gmail.com>
wrote:

The jar includes the OCR engine(Tesseract) as Windows x86 DLL files, but it
seems to run fine on Windows 7 x64.

This could easily be recompiled to use the Linux build of the OCR engine.
But I'm probably not going to do that any time soon.

License is Apache Version 2, so I don't know, could I sell this?