# Grab Text from Screen — Copy text from anywhere on your Mac screen

Drag over anything on screen — a video, a photo, a locked PDF — and copy the text in it. Part of OneMacTools, 151 private tools in one native Mac app (macOS 26 or later); category: Utilities. Runs on your Mac; nothing is uploaded.

Click Capture, drag over the part of the screen that has the text, and it's on your clipboard. Text recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework, so it works on paused videos, images, slides, and apps that won't let you select text.

Page: https://www.onemactools.com/tools/grab-text-from-screen · Download: https://www.onemactools.com/download · Pricing: https://www.onemactools.com/pricing

## How to use it
1. **Show the text on screen.** Open the video, photo, slide or app with the text you want. Pause a video on the right frame.
2. **Click Capture.** In Grab Text from Screen, click Capture. By default OneMacTools hides itself so it's not in the way. You can also choose Grab Text from Screen from the OneMacTools menu bar icon.
3. **Allow Screen Recording the first time.** macOS asks for permission the first time. Turn on OneMacTools in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen & System Audio Recording, then quit and reopen OneMacTools.
4. **Drag over the text.** Drag a box around the text with the crosshair. Press Escape to cancel.
5. **Paste it anywhere.** The text is read on your Mac, copied to the clipboard and shown in the window with a Copy button. The window says how many characters were copied.

## Options
- **Hide OneMacTools while selecting:** On by default. Hides the OneMacTools window while you drag, so it doesn't cover the text. Turn it off if the text is in a window behind OneMacTools that you'd rather not rearrange.
- **Keep line breaks:** On by default, so lines come out as they appear on screen. Turn it off to join everything into one line, which suits a sentence that wraps across several lines.
- **Also save as a text file:** Off by default. Turn it on to also save the text as Screen Text.txt in a new dated folder in Downloads › OneMacTools.

## Tips
- Drag tightly around just the text you need. Less background means fewer stray characters.
- Zoom in or make the window bigger before capturing small text. Larger text is read more accurately.
- Turn off Keep line breaks when copying a paragraph from a slide or subtitle, so it pastes as one flowing sentence.
- For text in a photo or PDF file you already have, Extract Text (OCR) reads the whole file without dragging.
- Check numbers, codes and email addresses after pasting. Text recognition is very good but can mix up characters like 0 and O.

## Questions
**How do I copy text from an image or video on my Mac screen?**
Click Capture in Grab Text from Screen and drag over the text. It's read on your Mac and copied to the clipboard, ready to paste.

**How do I copy text from a PDF that won't let me select it?**
Open the PDF, click Capture and drag over the text. Because it reads what's on screen, it works even when copying is locked or the PDF is a scan.

**Why does Grab Text need Screen Recording permission?**
It has to capture the part of the screen you select to read the text. Allow it in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen & System Audio Recording, then quit and reopen OneMacTools.

**Can I grab text without opening the app?**
Yes. Click the OneMacTools menu bar icon and choose Grab Text from Screen, or add the Grab Text from Screen action to a shortcut in the Shortcuts app.

**Why does it say no text was found?**
The area you selected didn't contain text it could read. Try a larger or sharper view of the text, or drag a box that covers the whole line.

**Can I get the text as one line instead of separate lines?**
Yes. Turn off Keep line breaks and every line is joined with spaces.

**Does it work with other languages?**
Yes. The language is detected automatically, using the languages macOS text recognition supports.