15 replies
1d10h
I use the same script as Dibby053, copied from stackoverflow but with some tweaks to work on kde,gnome and wayland as well as x11 and with some notifications on what state it is in.
I didn't test the x11/wayland check yet, but feel free to use it and report back.
#!/bin/bash
# Dependencies: tesseract-ocr imagemagick
# on gnome: gnome-screenshot
# on kde: spectacle
# on x11: xsel
# on wayland: wl-clipboard
die(){
notify-send "$1"
exit 1
}
cleanup(){
[[ -n $1 ]] && rm -rf "$1"
}
SCR_IMG=$(mktemp) || die "failed to take screenshot"
# shellcheck disable=SC2064
trap "cleanup '$SCR_IMG'" EXIT
notify-send "Select the area of the text"
if which "spectacle" &> /dev/null
then
spectacle -r -o "$SCR_IMG.png" || die "failed to take screenshot"
else
gnome-screenshot -a -f "$SCR_IMG.png" || die "failed to take screenshot"
fi
# increase image quality with option -q from default 75 to 100
mogrify -modulate 100,0 -resize 400% "$SCR_IMG.png" || die "failed to convert image"
#should increase detection rate
tesseract "$SCR_IMG.png" "$SCR_IMG" &> /dev/null || die "failed to extract text"
if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]
then
wl-copy < "$SCR_IMG.txt" || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"
else
xsel -b -i < "$SCR_IMG.txt" || die "failed to copy text to clipboard"
fi
notify-send "Text extracted"
exit
Formatting
I like all the error handling, but you could skip the temp files if you just pipe it through
This version looks nice and short, any thoughts on prober error reporting to the end user?
My version has more feedback for the user which was important because the user was somebody not familiar with linux/bash, but even my version "swallows" errors.
I added the `set pipefile...` suggested below, but I think mogrify only fails if the screenshot fails. Tesseract never fails if there is a valid input image, so realistically you only need one error message for the screenshot generation, unless you want to check whether the user misses any of the tools.
If you just put `set -o errexit -o pipefail -o nounset` in the first line after the shebang your script will have proper error-handling as well. Currently if any fails, notify-send will still be triggered.
I slightly modified your script to: 1. Clean up properly 2. Run spectacle in BG mode, so the window does not pop up after screenshotting.
This is great!
Also made some minor modifications: replaced `xsel` with `xclip` and added truncated version of the copied text to the `notify-send`:
I just frankenstein'd a few people's versions into my own MATE-based flavor.
For anyone running into barriers, mate-screenshot has no outfile `-f` option, so I worked around that by outputting through clipboard and capturing that with `xclip` (note, this is earlier in the script than the the xsel/xclip line in the parent and gp comments):
The other hiccup is that the dumped text file has two extraneous bytes '\x0a\x0c', so I truncated them with `head`: Might not be pretty, but it looks like this will work for me. Thank you all for this!Good catch with spectacle, I thought I fixed that already.
Why did you remove the -f parameter?
I also used the very same script until I stumbled upon this on hn [0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704483#33705272Ah just saw rjzzleep posted an updated version here. Happy to steal this one again :)
Looks nice
The Wayland leg works fine for me on gnome+wayland.
thanks!
The command passed to `trap` is evaluated normally, so variable expansions do take place.
Will behave correctly, and the expansion of SCR_IMG won't be susceptible to issues relating to unquoted shell characters.Alternatively, if you're using a modern bash (this probably won't work on a mac by default), then this is an option too:
thanks for fixing and explaining that, I thought '' would work and forgot about escaping characters.