You're looking at a Japanese product label in a photo, a French legal document someone scanned, or Chinese text in a video tutorial. You need that text — to paste into a translator, to send to a colleague, to include in a report. But you can't type those characters. You don't have the keyboard layout installed, you don't know the input method, and even if you did, looking at a character and reproducing it keystroke by keystroke would take forever. The text is right there on screen, readable by anyone who knows the language, but impossible for you to copy.
Foreign Characters Without the Right Keyboard Are Unreachable
macOS supports many keyboard layouts, but switching to one and learning its input method just to copy a few characters from an image is impractical. Character-by-character lookup in a Unicode table or an IME tool is painfully slow. Drawing input methods exist for some languages but are awkward for anything more than a single character.
The problem compounds when the text is inside an image, a scanned document, or a video frame — contexts where you can't select text even in your own language. Foreign language text in these formats is doubly inaccessible: you can't select it because it's an image, and you couldn't type it even if you could see each character clearly.
Select Foreign Text Visually, Copy It Digitally
Optic recognizes characters from your screen regardless of language. Activate it from the menu bar, drag over the foreign language text visible in any image, document, or video frame, and the recognized characters are copied to your clipboard — in the correct script, with the correct Unicode characters. Paste them into Google Translate, DeepL, or any application.
Translation Workflows
The fastest path from foreign text in an image to a translation is: select with Optic, paste into a translator. No manual transcription, no keyboard switching, no character lookup. Works with Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic, and other scripts.
International Documents
Scanned contracts, invoices, and forms in other languages contain names, addresses, and figures you may need to extract. Drag over the relevant section and paste the characters into your own documents, preserving the original script accurately.
Language Study
Encountering new vocabulary in images or videos? Select the text and paste it into a flashcard app or dictionary. Having the exact characters — rather than a guess at romanization — ensures accurate lookups and study.