Text Grab

Text Grab is a fast OCR utility for Windows that extracts text from anywhere on the screen instantly.

Text Grab is an optical character recognition utility built for Windows users, researchers, and IT professionals. It captures text, tables, and lists from any app, video, browser, or PDF using a keyboard shortcut. The software runs completely locally on the device, ensuring privacy without sending data to the cloud. Users can choose from multiple engines including Windows AI on the NPU, built-in Windows OCR, Tesseract, and Direct Text. It includes an edit window for cleaning text, a browser extension for capturing structured tables, and pattern matching for extracting specific values.

Text Grab at a glance

Best for: Writer, Student
Runs on: Windows, Chrome extension, Web
Pricing: Free on GitHub; paid on the Microsoft Store
Released: December 2020
Category: AI productivity tool
Website: textgrab.net

Key features

Extract text from anywhere on screen instantly
Float a transparent overlay on top of any window
Run bulk OCR on folders of images and PDFs
Copy tables and lists with formatting intact via browser extension
Use regex extraction and find and replace tools
Store frequently used text in a snippet dictionary
Evaluate math and unit conversions with a live calc pane

Use it for

Pulling text from images, videos, and PDFs
Capturing structured tables from web pages into spreadsheets
Scanning folders of images to extract searchable text
Extracting specific values like GUIDs and IP addresses from logs

Alternatives to Text Grab

NormCap — Extracts text from screen captures instead of saving images.
eSearch — It brings mobile-style screen search and instant translation to desktop.
Convertix — Runs entirely in the browser without uploading images to any server.
AI Text Detector — Analysis runs entirely in your browser to keep your text private.
Pix2Text — It provides a free alternative to Mathpix for math formula recognition and LaTeX export.
Letra — Copies any text on your screen instantly with a single keyboard shortcut.
CamLabs.ai — Verifies if redacted text can still be copied out of a PDF file.
PixLate — Translates documents and images while preserving the original layout and structure.
Slash Anywhere — Expands custom text, templates, and commands in any text box.
ScanPatra — Processes documents entirely on-device for privacy.
Readest — Read EPUB and PDF files with built-in translation, text-to-speech, and cross-device sync.
Rme PDF Scanner — It runs entirely on-device with zero ads, tracking, or backend servers.

All Text Grab alternatives