

You scan a few pages in a standard scanner, then run the images through an OCR app, and the result is ether a PDF file with selectable text or a long block of text that you can then use where you want. This technique has been around for many years, and it is used to convert scanned documents into usable text. You may be familiar with optical character recognition, or OCR.

In the Photos app, or in Preview, you can select and copy text from images.

This also works in macOS not with a camera, but with photos or screenshots. You can use this to point your iPhone’s camera at a phone number, then immediately make a call to that number to zoom in on an address, then find that address in Maps or even translate text on signs into one of a number of languages. This feature converts text in images to text that you can copy. One of the useful new features in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey is Live Text. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.How To How to Use Live Text on iPhone, iPad, and Mac Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more.
