Packages with the latest changes for your system:
... alternatively install from Microsoft Store, FlatHub, AUR or PyPi.
<esc>The settings menu ⚙ allows switching between the two capture modes: "parse" and "raw":
"Raw"-Mode
Marked by the ☰ symbol, it returns text just as detected by the OCR software. For example, all line-breaks are preserved.
"Parse"-Mode (default)
Indicated by the ★ symbol, it performs some formatting of the output based on certain implemented rules, which can take additional information like text position and content into account. In a first step, every rule calculates a "score" to determine the likelihood of being responsible for this type of text. In a second step, the rule which achieved the highest "score" takes the necessary actions to "transform" the input text according to its type. The following rules are currently implemented:
| Rule name | Score heuristics | Transform |
|---|---|---|
| Single line | Only single line is detected | Trim unnecessary whitespace |
| Multi line | Multiple lines, but single paragraph | Separate using line breaks and trim unnecessary whitespace in each line |
| Paragraph | Multiple blocks of lines or multiple paragraphs | Join every paragraph into a single line, separate different paragraphs by empty line |
| Number of chars in email addresses vs. overall chars | Transform to a comma-separated list of email addresses | |
| URL | Number of chars in URLs vs. overall chars | Transform to line-break separated URLs, discard all other characters. |
Try an alternative application and see if they work better for you.
The quality of detections is mainly determined by Tesseract, an open source project for OCR mainly of printed text. NormCap builds upon this great library and can influence the quality only a bit by preprocessing the images regarding screen specific properties. You, the user, have much more influence on the quality by paying attention to certain aspects:
The command to run NormCap from the terminal/console depends on your operating system and installation method:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\dynobo\NormCap\NormCap.exe
Run:
/Applications/NormCap.app/Contents/MacOS/NormCap
Run: ./NormCap-{version}-x86_64.AppImage
Run:
flatpak run --command=normcap com.github.dynobo.normcap
Run: normcap
Run: normcap
NormCap has some useful command line feature, you can list them by
appending the flag --help to the command mentioned above.
You'll have to configure that using your operating system's functionality, e.g. following these guides:
To identify the command to run NormCap, please see the FAQs entry How can I start NormCap via command line interface?
The reasoning for not adding an option to configure a shortcut within NormCap itself can be found in this Architecture Decision Record. If you like to challenge this argumentation, feel free to open a discussion.
Use your operating system's functionality to autostart applications after boot. You can find guides on the internet, e.g.:
Important: Add the --background-mode flag to
the command used to start NormCap to
launch NormCap minimized to system tray without triggering a capture on
application start.
First identify the command to run NormCap on your system as described in the FAQ How can I start NormCap via command line interface?
To this command, append the flag
--background-mode to start NormCap right into the system
tray, without triggering a capture.
This is e.g. useful, if, you want to autostart NormCap after system start.
The prebuilt packages are shipped with support for English only. To install additional languages, click the settings icon and in the "Languages" section of the menu "add/remove...".
If you installed NormCap as Python package, refer to the online documentation on how to install additional language for Tesseract on your system.
NormCap's MSI installer is much larger than the ones for Linux and macOS because the included Tesseract binaries are larger.
NormCap used to include a set of smaller binaries, which resulted in more consistent installer file sizes for all operating systems. Unfortunately, they seemed to lack some dependencies and lead to issues on some Windows systems. Hopefully, the larger binaries will fix this issue. This decision is not set in stone, so please feel free to leave some feedback regarding this topic!
No. The text recognition is performed offline using the OCR framework Tesseract.
No telemetry data is collected and by default also no other data is sent anywhere.
However, some (optional) features require accessing resources on the web and therefore expose minimal information (like IP address) to the accessed server:
Some applications offer similar features like NormCap and might be a good or even better alternative for you: It completely depends on your use case and requirements. Some similar open-source Projects are:
Launch NormCap via a terminal/console using
the right command for your system, to
which you can append the flag --verbosity debug or short
-v debug. This will print additional information to the
console, which can be useful to identify problems.
Please try to take a look at the debug information. It might provide enough information for you to solve the issue for yourself. If it doesn't help you, don't hesitate to report your problem description together with debug information.
Did you run the msi-installer to upgrade from an older NormCap version, but the installer stated an error or the NormCap can't be started anymore?
You did nothing wrong, this is the recommended way to upgrade NormCap. But in rare cases, this does not work, because of incompatible changes in the installer between certain versions.
In that case, please try to uninstall all existing NormCap versions from your system before trying a clean installation. (In the process, your settings might get reset, and you might have to re-download languages.)
If you still experience any problems after such a clean installation, please report that issue.
Is your display environment Gnome Shell? Then you probably need to install a Gnome Shell extension to support showing applications in the top bar, e.g.:
NormCap's notifications depend on the system tray functionality. If you start NormCap, but its Icon doesn't appear in the system tray, proceed like in the question above.
In case you get an output like this...
$ normcap
QtFatalMsg - This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin
could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen,
vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.... the chances are, this can be solved by installing additional dependencies:
pacman -S qt6-waylandpacman -S libxcb xcb-util-cursorapt install qt6-waylandapt install libxcb1 libxcb-cursor0
dnf install qt6-qtwaylanddnf install libxcb xcb-util-cursorThis is behavior was observed only on KDE + Wayland (#422) so far, and only when NormCap was started via a keyboard shortcut / key binding. The root cause is still unknown, if you have any information or ideas, please comment in the ticket above.
Strangely, a workaround seems to be to configure the keyboard shortcut via "System Settings" → "Shortcuts" → "Add command" and configure the command in a way, that it pipes the output to somewhere, e.g. /dev/null:
normcap 2>&1 | tee /dev/null
This is not a NormCap issue but a requirement for AppImages. You need to
make sure, that the FUSE library is installed on your system.
E.g. on Ubuntu 22.04 you need to run
sudo apt install libfuse2. See
this blog post for details.
The
application used to package the AppImage
has a number of runtime requirements. One of those requirements is
libcrypt.so.1, which should be provided by most modern Linux
distributions, as it is mandated as part of the Linux Standard Base Core
Specification. However, some distributions don't include
libcrypt.so.1 as part of the base OS configuration. This can
usually be fixed by installing the libxcrypt-compat package.
This issue usually occurs on the after installing NormCap, either for the first time or after an update.
This is a known issue related to macOS's permissions settings: If NormCap
doesn't have the system's permission to take a screenshot, an empty
desktop will be shown.
(To be precise: NormCap doesn't know that it lacks
permissions, tries to take a screenshot nevertheless, which results in a
screenshot of the empty desktop.)
Steps to solve this:
Hopefully, this cumbersome user experience can be improved in a future release.
briefcase build
To verify, if this is the issue you are facing, run the docker image
interactively and try to run the linuxdeploy-*.AppImage file
there:
$ docker run -it \
--volume /home/<USER>/<PROJECT PATH>/normcap/linux:/app:z \
--volume /home/<USER>/.briefcase:/home/brutus/.briefcase:z \
--env VERSION=0.2.0 briefcase/eu.dynobo.normcap:py3.9 \
/bin/bash
$ /home/brutus/.briefcase/tools/linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage
If that results in a No such file or directory error,
according to
this issue
and
this one
a workaround is to correct the "magic" bytes of the AppImage. This worked
for me:
sed '0,/AI\x02/{s|AI\x02|\x00\x00\x00|}' -i linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImagePrebuilt:
Python package:
wl-clipboard can be omitted on X11 based
systems
sudo apt install build-essential tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng
libtesseract-dev libleptonica-dev wl-clipboardsudo pacman -S tesseract tesseract-data-eng wl-clipboardsudo dnf install tesseract wl-clipboardsudo zypper install python3-devel tesseract-ocr
tesseract-ocr-devel wl-clipboardpip install normcap./normcapbrew install tesseract tesseract-langpip install normcap./normcap/tessdata subfolder and the
tesseract.exe binary. Depending on if you installed
Tesseract system-wide or in user space, the base folder should be:
C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR
or
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Tesseract-OCRTESSDATA_PREFIX and set it
to your Tesseract base folder, e.g.:TESSDATA_PREFIX, Value:
"C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR"
PATH, e.g.:PATH → "Edit..." → Add a new entry
"C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR"
tesseract --list-langspip install normcap./normcap