Spectacle OCR Screenshot

A simple Qt application that integrates KDE Spectacle screenshot tool with Tesseract OCR to extract text from screenshots as well QR codes.

Features

• 📷 Capture screenshots using KDE's Spectacle tool
• 🔍 Extract text from screenshots using Tesseract OCR
• 📱 Decode QR codes from screenshots
• 💻 Display extracted text in a user-friendly interface
• 🌍 Support for multiple languages
• ✏️ Edit extracted text before saving
• 📋 Copy text to clipboard
• 💾 Save text to file
• 🖼️ Save the screenshot as .png

Requirements

• Qt 6.x
• Tesseract OCR
• Leptonica
• KDE Spectacle
• Zxing (for QR code decoding)

Installation

Get the binaries from: Releases Page.

Usage

Run the application:

./spectacle-ocr-screenshot

Tip

Recommended Usage

Create a symlink to the executable in your local PATH for easy access:

sudo ln -s spectacle-ocr-screenshot /usr/local/bin/

Then you can run the application from anywhere using or by assigning a keyboard shortcut to spectacle-ocr-screenshot

The application will:

1. Launch Spectacle in region selection mode
2. After capturing, click on save, this will save to /tmp
3. The extracted text will be displayed in the application window
4. You can edit the text, copy it to clipboard or save it to a file

Command Line Options

• --lang <language>: Specify the language(s) for OCR (default: eng)

  • Use ISO 639-3 language codes
  • For multiple languages, join them with '+' (e.g., --lang eng+hin for English and Hindi)

• --disable-qr: Disable QR code detection

Examples:

# Use English OCR (default)
./spectacle-ocr-screenshot

# Use German OCR
./spectacle-ocr-screenshot --lang deu

# Use multiple languages (English and Spanish)
./spectacle-ocr-screenshot --lang eng+spa

Available Languages

Tesseract OCR supports many languages. Some common language codes:

• eng - English
• deu - German
• hin - Hindi

Manual Installation

Building from Source

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/funinkina/spectacle-ocr-screenshot.git
cd spectacle-ocr-screenshot

2. Install build dependencies:

For Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S qt6-base tesseract leptonica spectacle

For Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev tesseract-ocr libleptonica-dev kde-spectacle

For Fedora:

sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase tesseract leptonica spectacle

3. Build the project:

qmake6 simple.pro
make

You can also build using cmake:

Make sure you have cmake installed!

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Note

You may need to install language packs for Tesseract OCR separately.

License

MIT

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