iText
iText is a Mac menu bar OCR app that captures or imports images, extracts text from them, and can translate the recognized text.
What is iText?
iText is a native Mac OCR utility from Toolinbox that helps you extract text from screenshots, image files, PDFs, and other visual content. It is designed for people who frequently need to copy text from images, such as notes from scanned documents, text shown in apps or websites, or printed material captured on screen. The app works from the menu bar and offers several ways to start recognition, including screen capture, dragging an image onto the menu bar icon, and choosing an image file directly. It can also optimize recognized text for easier reading by improving paragraph layout and spacing, and it provides image previewing to help with proofreading. For users who work across languages, iText can translate recognized text into many languages after extraction. This makes it useful for study, research, light document processing, and quick text capture workflows on macOS.
Key features
- Capture part of the screen and extract text from it
- Recognize text from image files and visual documents
- Drag images to the menu bar icon for quick OCR
- Optimize layout by improving paragraph and spacing output
- Preview the original image while proofreading recognized text
- Translate recognized text into many languages
- Copy recognized text for quick pasting into other apps
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Safety overview
Status: Mostly safe
iText is a legitimate OCR and translation app for macOS. Access to screen content or selected images is normal for its purpose, since it needs that material to recognize text. The app's published product information also notes that images are uploaded to Google's servers for OCR, so avoid using it for especially sensitive screenshots or documents unless you are comfortable with that data handling.
Recommendation: Keep iText if you use it to capture text from screenshots or images on your Mac. If you no longer rely on OCR or translation from the menu bar, you can remove it without affecting macOS, though you may lose saved app settings or convenience features tied to the app.
Common paths
/Applications/iText.app~/Applications/iText.app
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