Textify : Copy Text from All Windows Controls & Dialog Boxes

In your Windows PC you can launch all different kinds of programs and when these programs generate dialog boxes – most of the text in these dialog boxes cannot be selected or copied. For example, if you open Windows Notepad (the basic text editor included in Windows) and then select Help → About Notepad from the menubar, you will see the typical “About” dialog. In this About dialog, there is lots of text but none of it cannot be selected or copied. Similarly, you cannot copy/select text from other controls like the OK button.

In order to make any text selectable and copiable in any open window, dialog or other controls, you can use the free Textify utility. This new tool is developed by the same developer RaMMicHaeL who has developed other popular tools like Unchecky. Textify is a portable tool so you do not have install anything on your system.

Textify opens up a very small window that shows the default mouse shortcut (middle mouse button + Shift key) but you can of course configure the shortcut to anything you want. You can use this mouse shortcut when pointing your mouse cursor on any text that you want to temporarily turn into selectable text.

Textify

Once the text is selectable, you can select it, right-click on it and then choose Copy from the context-menu to copy it to the clipboard. And yes, instead of right-clicking, you can also use the hotkey Ctrl+C to copy the text. Clicking anywhere else on the screen will turn that selectable text back to what it was – unselectable. Now you can paste that text from the clipboard anywhere in any application you want.

Textify

You can keep the Textify running in the background and use it as you want. If you do not want the the Textify window to be shown each time you run this tool, then you can create a shortcut with a parameter -hidewnd in the command line to launch the Textify application. The full command line would look something like C:\Tools\Textify.exe -hidewnd but it varies depending on where you have places the Textify program.

Conclusion: There are many OCR apps that claim to read the text from all windows and dialog boxes, but they do not work as expected. Textify takes a different approach and turns all kinds of text in all types of windows into selectable and copiable text making it very easy for you to copy-paste text from any dialog box or windows controls.

You can download Textify from http://rammichael.com/textify.