Kleptomania
Reviewed by Terry Bibo
For years I have been a passionate supporter of Printkey, a utility that enables screen capture of whole screens, windows on the desktop, and content in defined rectangles, with the ability to save and manipulate the capture in a variety of graphic formats. But therein lies its basic deficiency; it is essentially a bitmap output that cannot be manipulated in a text editor or word processor, or searched for content. It is a very useful utility that has its competitors, but none that I have found to equal Kleptomania. This is a vastly more useful tool in that it captures both graphics and text, and uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to render the text readable in a file.
On installation Kleptomania reads all installed Windows fonts into its database for recognition. An icon in the system tray gives instant access to the program, and a hotkey can be defined for those who prefer keyboard access. Graphics can be selected by defining them within a rectangle or nominating the window containing them. But that is commonplace. What is not is that text can be selected from almost any program open on the desktop, and copied in readable and searchable format into a text processor. Text can be selected in the normal way by highlighting, or by selecting the window containing it, or more wonderfully by drawing a rectangle around it. Thus a column, or columns, from a spreadsheet or database can be isolated from the parent document. Underlining is recognised, and the output can be in text or Rich Text Format (RTF). Plain text or RTF selections can be appended to previous selections, enabling collation of disparate elements into a single paragraph or document.
When a selection is made a dialog box opens showing the font name, the number of lines, words, and characters selected, and the total of any column of figures. So no longer will you need to open your calculator to sum a few running expenses or intermediate distances for your next holiday. Just select the column with Kleptomania for an immediate result.
Readable text is not confined to documents where the input has been directly through the keyboard, and appears in a text, html, or WinWord document. Because it uses OCR, Kleptomania captures text from within dialog boxes and popup menus that are, in fact, graphics. I thought this would be a major breakthrough in bypassing the scanner as a means of extracting text from pictures. The digital camera plus Kleptomania should give us almost instant results. But Pavel Senatorov, StructuRise CEO, has pointed out that Kleptomania cannot and will never extract anything blurred, no matter whether it comes from a scanner, fax modem, or digital camera. They make pixel-to-pixel exact character images, introducing degrees of inaccuracy. Kleptomania makes an exact replica of the characters by a search/compare routine with installed fonts. It has an inherent inability to deal with scans/faxes, but it has the capability of defining text font/size with unprecedented exactness - a feature that cannot be matched by general purpose OCR engines like OmniPage. Kleptomania's engine is very much smaller than that of a general purpose OCR program. Its strength is that it is many times simpler to write exact comparisons with it .
The program is Internet aware in that selecting web or e-mail addresses allows options to open the browser or e-mail client at that address.
Initially I had difficulty in copying from one of my databases that uses Ariel 10pt with a screen resolution of 1024x768. This was immediately apparent in the copying dialog box, with a random number of characters missing from most words. And I solved the problem by increasing font size temporarily to 12pt. Pavel Senatorov subsequently advised turning off font smoothing to improve rendition. This problem was not apparent later on in copying in RTF from a popup menu using Sans Serif 8pt. So be prepared to make small concessions if all is not immediately perfect. At the time of writing Kleptomania did not support copying from PDF documents, but that is of small concern since Acrobat Reader itself permits basic copying. It has my enthusiastic support.Kleptomania Private v. 2.5 costs $29.95(US), and Kleptomania Commercial costs $49.95. Both programs may be purchased securely online at http://www.structurise.com/. Site licenses are available. You can download a fully functional, 21-day trial version of Kleptomania from the same web site.
The Kleptomania engine is also available for developers in the form of Textract SDK (Software Development Kit). Among its users there are probably consultants, managers and developers who are unaware that such an SDK exists, and that it can greatly simplify or assist in the development of their software and hardware integration projects. Textract features can be found at www.structurise.com/textract.