New Windows OCR Text Recognition Method Added

What does this mean?

The TextSearch trigger now includes new options in the "Symbols" dropdown. These let you use Windows-based optical character recognition (OCR) to convert images into text. In testing, this approach proved to be more reliable and performant than the previous Tesseract-based OCR used in EyeAuras.

Please note: to use Windows OCR, you must install the required language pack in Windows. For example, if you want to recognize Spanish characters, the Spanish language pack must be installed on your system.

There is also one limitation that still needs to be addressed: Windows OCR does not support multilingual OCR. In practice, this means it cannot recognize Russian and English characters in the same sentence, for example. There are some well-known workarounds for this, but this method should first be tested as-is, without additional logic layered on top.

A few tips:

• Binary thresholding, which was widely used with Tesseract OCR, is much less effective with Windows OCR. This is one of the reasons the new method is both faster and more reliable.
• Size matters. If OCR returns empty text, try adding scaling through the UI settings. In many cases, even a small image size adjustment can noticeably improve results.
• If you installed a new language and it does not appear in the dropdown, simply restart the application.
• You can read more in the wiki.

Bug Fixes / Improvements

• [Image Effects] Improved the Eyedropper functionality — you can now specify a range that will be applied to the selected color. Exact selection creates an exact match, while narrow/wide applies scaling to create a region.