Some applications just need to be big and have to offer an extensive array of functionalities to be of the right value for specific use cases. Think about LibreOffice, Krita. darktable or GIMP. But there are many situations that just require the right amount of functionality and nothing more. In Sweden, they have a word for that, “Lagom”, which means “not too little and not too much”. There are many very powerful mini apps available for Linux that focus on just one specific task, and they do it perfectly. With this article, I am continuing my Mini Review series, and focusing on the open source application NormCap, a simple but powerful text-capturing screenshot tool for Linux.

Content of this article

1. Introduction
2. What is NormCap
3. How does NormCap work
4. NormCap in practice
5. How to download and install NormCap
6. Final words

What is NormCap

NormCap is a simple, single-task, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) powered screen-capture tool that enables you to capture textual information directly from any part of your screen or browser. With the application NormCap, you can quickly and effortlessly extract text from whatever source. Think of sources such as images, websites, your desktop, file manager, and even a paused moment of a video. Also, it is possible to scan QR codes and bar codes to extract the hidden data, and even email addresses and URLs are detected and handled without a problem. So basically, you can extract text from anywhere. Out of the box, the NormCap app supports English only, but you can install many additional languages via the menu of the application. NormCap is a private app because it is doing all the processing on your local machine. So, no data is collected and transferred via the internet.

The open source code and related information can be found on the GitHub dynobo normcap page. Because NormCap is available in Flatpak format, it canbe simply installed and used on any Linux distribution (see the “How to download and install NormCap” section later in this article).

How does NormCap work

The first time you start NormCap, you will be welcomed with a clear textual and visual explanation of basic usage of the app. You can disable this screen so it doesn’t pop up the next time you start the application.

These are the basic steps to use NormCap:

1. Start the application and wait till a pink border appears on your screen.
2. Select an area on your screen that contains the text you want to capture.
3. Wait for the notification that the capture was successful or when the pink tray icon appears.
4. Now you can paste the captured and converted text from your clipboard into any application.

That is basically all you need to recognize and convert text from a screenshot of your browser, photograph, etc, into editable text.

But there are some settings that we can change. When you are in step 1, as previously described, and the pink border is visible, there is also a pink gear icon visible in the top right corner. Here you can toggle on or off to show notifications and to keep the app icon in the system tray. You can also check for updates.

Further, you can select the preferred detection modes, being text and QR & Barcodes, and add or remove support for other languages.

NormCap in practice

Let’s try some example captures and see what the text recognition quality is of NormCap.

Case 1

First, I want to try an easy example, a text capture from an article on realLinuxUser.com.

Here is the result of the capture and text recognition via NormCap, which recognized and transformed the grabbed text almost perfectly. The only small incorrectness is the capital “I”, which was interpreted as a pipe (“|”) symbol four times. But still a great result.

Krita: the best open source drawing, painting and illustration software in practice

| can ofcourse show some of my own drawings created with Krita, but even though | can draw pretty well, it is better and more interesting for you that | share some information about other, much better artists who work with Krita and push this software to the limits. One of them | personally think is rising above it, is David Revoy (https://www.davidrevoy.com/). This, in my eyes, fantastic digital artist calls himself a “digital artist using 100% open-source” and has been working for years with an open comic initiative under the name Pepper & Carrot. He not only uses Krita as his daily driver, he also frequently develops new brushes for Krita that he offers free of charge to the community.

Case 2

Now let’s try to grab a screenshot of the file names in my Downloads folder, something that without an application like NormCap is not that easy to get all the names of the files in one go to be used in a text that I am writing.

Here an example:

Here is the result of the capture and text recognition via NormCap, which recognized and transformed the grabbed text perfectly, including the file name in Dutch:

Aangifte_inkomstenbelasting_2023_12-04-2024_15.41u.pdf

Forecast_ets_example.xlsx

onlyoffice-desktopeditors_amd64.deb

Zorin-OS-18-Core-64-bit-RC.iso

Zorin-OS-18-Press-Media-Kit.zip

03_RapidRAW_v1.3.13_ubuntu-22.04_amd64.deb

tempFileForShare_20250923-202856.jpg

QUO-07722-V5F7G0 – Rev.0.pdf

ProtonMail-desktop-beta.deb

Case 3

Now let’s try to get a capture from a scanned old newspaper with different font styles and sizes and imperfect printing. Here is the image of the newspaper. Let’s try to grab the text in the left hand side of the article.

Source: beatlesdaily.com

Here is the result of the capture and text recognition via NormCap, which recognized and transformed the grabbed text perfectly again.

From BARRIE HARDING New York, Friday

Five thousand screaming, chant- ing teenagers—most of them playing truant from school —gave the Beatles a fantastic welcome here today.

More than 100 extra police were on duty to control the crowd as the group’s jet landed at the John F. Kennedy Airport.

Case 4

Let’s try another language. One of my favorite countries is Iceland. In the Icelandic language there are some characters that you can’t find on a standard keyboard, so let’s try to grab and convert an Icelandic medieval poem to see how NormCap is handling those special characters.

Here is the result of the capture and text recognition, in which NormCap did an OK job, but had some trouble with the special Icelandic characters.

Fé er frænda róg,

ok fyrða gaman,

ok grafseiðs gata.

Conclusion:

Except for some minor errors, I think NormCap works really great. The resulting text is every capture perfect to almost perfect and thus very usable for text capturing.

How to download and install NormCap

If your Linux distribution supports the Flatpak package format out of the box, you can simply open your Software Store app, search for NormCap and install it from there. You can also open your Terminal via Ctrl + Alt + T and copy and paste the below command:

flatpak install flathub com.github.dynobo.normcap

If your Linux distro does not have Flatpak support out of the box, follow the guide that fits your distribution via link below:

Set up Flatpak

For more information on NormCap, you can find the application home page here: 

Go to the NormCap home page

When you try out and use NormCap and are really happy with this application, you should consider supporting the developer by buying one or more coffees.

https://buymeacoffee.com/dynobo

Final Words

NormCap is, in my opinion, a really nice, simple, powerful, and effective tool that can help you as a content creator, as a writer, as a text editor, or for whatever other goal you have in mind, by simply grabbing text from situations you normally can not copy text from. But with NormCap, you simply select a piece of text, convert it, and use it in your written text, email, presentation, or research. So, for someone like me who is often doing reviews explaining what other applications can do or how they work, NormCap works very well when there is only a screenshot available from which I need to grab some text fast and reliably.

If you have tips for other great single-task applications for Linux for which you think a mini review is of value for other readers, please let me know via the Contact page.

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