9

I am learning Japanese and installed the OS in Japanese to immerse myself in the language. Sometimes I want to copy messages from windows, menus and dialog boxes so that I can look them up on the dictionary, but I cant. I saw that there there many options for doing this in Windows. Are there any similar options available for Ubuntu?

tatsuhirosatou
  • 93
  • 5
  • According to comments in http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/50406/how-do-i-copy-the-text-content-of-a-dialog-box-on-os-x (about MacOS), it seems to depend on how the programmer codes the content. I couldn't find any links relating to Linux :( – DK Bose Oct 24 '15 at 05:51

1 Answers1

3

Make a screenshot and use OCR

  1. Install OCR software

    sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-jpn

  2. Install a GUI for tesseract

    sudo apt-get install gimagereader

  3. Make a screenshot of your desktop or of a part of your desktop

  4. Start gimagereader and start the recognizion

    enter image description here

  5. Copy the text into the right pane and translate

cl-netbox
  • 30,845
  • 7
  • 93
  • 131
A.B.
  • 89,123
  • 21
  • 245
  • 323
  • 1
    Great idea! :D :D :D – Fabby Oct 27 '15 at 17:24
  • 1
    Not sure if the resolution is sufficient, but creative thinking! – Jacob Vlijm Oct 28 '15 at 18:16
  • 1
    I thought of the screenshot part, but adding the OCR is genius! – Joe Oct 30 '15 at 08:08
  • That is a lot of work and for a kludge work-around that, at best will guess what the text was. This is a useful, high priority feature. The program passes text to the dialog box, the dialog box itself should be able to regurgitatae its contents on demand. It should not have anything to do with how any software other than the dialog box was coded. I would imagine that is the Bailiwick of the DE or maybe X (im not too familiar with Linux but I have developed extensively for windows (where the feature had existed for years, then was removed, and because of a user revolt - reinstated). – flurbius Oct 30 '16 at 21:08