The addition of Apple Live Text to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS last year allows bitmap text in images to be treated almost like letters and words. On macOS, click an image in Preview, Safari, and other apps, and you can highlight text and copy or translate it, open URLs, and send an email.

But Live Text only goes so far. It only works with images you can open or select, and requires macOS 12 Monterey for Mac users. If you’re on an older version of macOS, or don’t want to take screenshots and open them in Text Capture Preview (among other workarounds), check out TextSniper.

This single-purpose application provides text recognition with quality that, in my testing, matches Live Text, allowing you to make selections anywhere on Mac screens. The recognition accuracy for both perfect and complex text is better than some other companies’ products, including Adobe Acrobat and Google Docs. It is comparable to Live Text, PDFpen and Microsoft OneNote, and only Live Text is optimized for fast, ad-hoc recognition. (You can see the full results in our July 2021 live comparison.)

Just press the TextSniper keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-2) or select “Text Capture” from its menu and draw a rectangle around the part of the screen you want to extract as text. This shortcut can be changed in the app’s settings, where you can also customize keystrokes to toggle or invoke various features of the app.

This approach to capturing data can be useful even for those who use Monterey. Live Text doesn’t recognize everything and it takes a click to call and then sometimes a little effort to find where the function thinks the text starts. Live Text often fails to highlight the entire piece of text unless the algorithm recognizes it as continuous.

TextSniper has no problem skewing, rotating, or shading text as long as it fits within a rectangle. (Live Text automatically identifies text from any angle, too.) However, in testing, I’ve found that rotated text sometimes causes TextSniper to swap a line or two, which may be related to how it recognizes the start of a line.

Capturing part of the screen copies the extracted text to the clipboard. You can optionally enable or disable line break removal, which will allow TextSniper to attempt to stitch text into paragraphs or longer lines. You can also enable text-to-speech and TextSniper will read its results aloud as soon as you release the capture.

For text that cannot be easily captured with a single selection, you can enable an additional clipboard. Each subsequent capture adds additional extracted text until you paste the contents of the clipboard or reset it. This can help with one of the few disadvantages of TextSniper compared to Apple’s recognition: Live Text identifies columns of text and creates a selection as you drag within each column. TextSniper only identifies lines of text. The optional clipboard overcomes this.

But even though Apple’s Live Text does a good job with columns, the text it copies is always a line at a time – there’s no way to join lines in paragraphs. This is an option in TextSniper. When this feature is enabled, the application accurately recognizes the end of most paragraphs and automatically removes hyphens for words separated by a line.

The app supports macOS’s ability to take photos via an iPhone or iPad connected to the same iCloud account, allowing for enhanced extraction of text that isn’t displayed on the screen.

If you regularly use certain words that are not part of the more general use of the language, you can add them as a long list in the Custom Words section of the app’s settings. There is no way for the app to provide feedback on recognition – for example, it won’t learn from corrections you can make.

TextSniper also recognizes and decodes QR codes and standard barcodes, a handy feature since Apple doesn’t process encoded data except in a limited case. (This scenario? When signing up for two-factor authentication and adding a shared secret as a QR code.) To convert these codes to numbers and text, you must enable a separate keyboard shortcut. Text to Speech can read the extracted barcodes and the information in the QR code aloud.

The app can extract text from multiple languages ​​when used with macOS 11 Big Sur or 12 Monterey: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese. When used with macOS 10.15 Catalina, only English is supported. The app can be purchased directly from the developer for $7.99 for one Mac or $9.99 for a license that covers up to three Macs. When purchased from the Mac App Store, it can be used with an unlimited number of Macs and Family Sharing members. The app is also part of the Setapp subscription software library.

While Live Text is the best after sliced ​​bread, it profoundly changes the way we interact with text. That said, Live Text is a bit like delicious supermarket bread: it gets the job done, and it’s not that bad, but it’s not everything you might expect. TextSniper, by this analogy, is more like a well-baked fresh baguette: crispy and almost perfect. If you find that Live Text can’t keep up with your needs, TextSniper fills in nooks and crannies and goes beyond Live Text’s strong but basic intent.

With the Mac renaissance in recent years, we want to highlight the tools we use and which readers recommend to get the most out of macOS. Mac Gems highlights great nuggets of Mac software, applications that are highly useful, pay close attention to a limited set of problems that need to be solved, and are usually developed by an individual or a small company. Stay tuned for weekly updates and submit your suggestions to the Mac Gems Twitter feed (@mcgems).