Status-Q

I remember one of the features that first attracted me to the Mac, back around the turn of the millennium, was its pervasive support for PDFs.

On Windows, I’d had to install cumbersome Adobe software to convert certain formats into PDF documents. On the Mac, any app that could print could create PDFs without the need for other software: it was there in the Print dialog. (Pervasive PDF support came partly from the fact that the graphical system for the NeXT computer had used Display Postscript, and OS X incorporated a kind of ‘Display PDF’.)

Well, another technology that’s becoming pretty pervasive in the Apple world is OCR: the thing that can recognise text in images and turn it into regular text. When travelling recently, I discovered that I didn’t need to use things like Google Translate so often: if I just pointed my iPhone camera at, say, a Dutch street sign I didn’t understand, it recognised there was some text on it, and by clicking the little text-selection box I then had ‘Translate’ as one of the options.

This automatic OCR is built into Preview on the Mac, too. I was writing a few paragraphs in a comment on website recently, and the browser suddenly became unresponsive and I could neither continue editing nor do anything else with the page. Closing it was my only option, but I didn’t want to lose all my typing.

So I first did the old Shift-Cmd-4 — a keyboard shortcut nearly as old as the Mac itself — to screenshot part of the window, and then in Preview I could select, copy and paste my text elsewhere. Nice, accurate and quick!