v1.4.0

Fixed

• Shell's own "Screenshot captured, paste the image from the clipboard" toast was not always hidden after a capture, which is wrong because the clipboard receives text. The icon check that finds it is now tolerant of the icon's string form.

Added

• Keyboard shortcut to start a capture, Super+Shift+T by default, changeable or disableable in Preferences. It works with the panel icon hidden. (#12)

Changed

• New panel icon (a capture frame around a "T"). It ships with the extension, so it looks the same on every distro and icon theme.

OCR Text Extractor 1.1.3

Fixed

• On GNOME Shell 50 the "Copied" popup threw an error, so a successful extraction was reported as "OCR failed". The popup uses the new showAll() call there, and a failing popup falls back to a notification instead of reporting a failure.
• Each snip now starts with no selection box. Previously the box from the last snip stayed in place and had to be moved with its handles.

OCR Text Extractor 1.1.2

Changed

• Renamed to "OCR Text Extractor" so it is easy to tell apart from other extensions called "Text Extractor".
• The description now mentions PowerToys Text Extractor, which this extension is the GNOME equivalent of.

Text Extractor 1.1.1

Changed

• The extension description says that Tesseract OCR must be installed.
• The install command for a missing Tesseract or language pack is no longer exported as a string. notifyInstallCommand() passes it to a notification (or the preferences status row) only, so it cannot be used in a spawn call.

Text Extractor 1.1.0

Added

• Any language installed for Tesseract can be used, including several at once (eng+tam).
• Custom tessdata folder for user-supplied .traineddata files.
• Preferences show the install command for the user's distribution when Tesseract or a language is missing.
• Support for GNOME Shell 45 to 51.

Changed

• Screenshots use GNOME's built-in screenshot UI, reduced to area selection, instead of gnome-screenshot.
• Text goes to the clipboard through St.Clipboard instead of xclip.
• The capture mode Shell remembers (selection, screen or window) is restored after each extraction, so the normal screenshot tool is unchanged.
• Success feedback is a short on-screen toast instead of a notification, and Shell's own "Screenshot captured" notification is dismissed for these captures.
• All subprocess calls are asynchronous and no longer block the shell.
• Preferences no longer keep widget references after the window closes.

Removed

• gnome-screenshot and xclip dependencies.
• scripts/install-dependencies.sh, replaced by in-app install hints.
• Unused stylesheet.css and unsupported shell version entries.

v1.0.0

🚀 Initial release of Text Extractor for GNOME — a simple and fast OCR tool for the GNOME Shell, inspired by PowerToys Text Extractor for Windows.

✨ Features

• 🖼️ Select any part of your screen to extract text
• 📋 Automatically copies extracted text to clipboard
• 🌐 Supports English and Tamil (தமிழ்) OCR
• ⚡ Uses Tesseract for accurate and fast recognition
• 🧰 Integrated preferences for language and panel visibility

📦 Dependencies

• tesseract-ocr
• xclip
• gnome-screenshot
• (Optional) tesseract-ocr-tam for Tamil support

👉 Installation Instructions

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🔧 Tested on:

• Fedora 40
• GNOME Shell 48.2

💬 Feedback and contributions welcome!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/imshaaz21/text-extractor-gnome/commits/v1.0.0