Text Extractor No Longer Works as Expected

[jschlie]

Microsoft PowerToys version

0.83.0

Installation method

Microsoft Store

Running as admin

No

Area(s) with issue?

TextExtractor

Steps to reproduce

Start the tool using the hotkey combination Attempt to capture text

✔️ Expected Behavior

To operate as it did in the last release.

❌ Actual Behavior

I have multiple monitors and when starting text extractor I now have odd behavior occurring where I'm getting some new capture dialogue showing up at the top of my screen, an application window from another screen is transposed onto the screen my mouse was on when pressing the hotkey combination and when I am able to get to the application I intend to copy text from the results are truncated and mostly unusable. Prior to this update it worked fine. I just tried it on a machine running 0.82.0 and it still functions as expected.

Other Software

No response

[similar-issues-ai[bot]]

We've found some similar issues:

• #32717 , similarity score: 85%
• #33814 , similarity score: 83%
• #32190 , similarity score: 83%
• #32443 , similarity score: 82%
• #27586 , similarity score: 82%
• #27046 , similarity score: 81%
• #23676 , similarity score: 81%

If any of the above are duplicates, please consider closing this issue out and adding additional context in the original issue.

Note: You can give me feedback by 👍 or 👎 this comment.

[TheJoeFin]

That is interesting to hear that the behavior changed between 0.82 and 0.83. I don't think any changes were made on our side. Could you attach a /bugreport to help diagnose the issue.

[RickRosendaal]

Just wanted to mention I have the exact same issue. When a second monitor is connected, it tosses 1 or more of my windows on my other monitor causing me to be unable to copy what I wanted to copy. I didn't have this issue in the past, but I believe I haven't tried using this tool with a second monitor connected before.

[TheJoeFin]

/bugreport

[jschlie]

Sorry all I've been offline for a bit. To add to this it started happening as described on my work computer which has multiple monitors. Unlike the screen capture tool win+alt+s where I'm able to capture images on any screen, text capture win+alt+t appears to only work on the original screen the mouse was on when pressing the hot key combination and well not allow capture on any other screen. This to seems like a change that's recently occurred, but I can't put a definite time in when that started. I'll include a report bug zip file shortly.

Sent from my Boost Samsung Galaxy A13 5G Get Outlook for Androidhttps://aka.ms/AAb9ysg

---

[jschlie]

Here's the bugreport zip file as promised.

PowerToysReport_2024-08-26-16-42-48.zip

[classicitbb]

also it would be good if text extractor could detect a table grid and paste as table or with table formatting into excel

`import pandas as pd

def process_extracted_text(extracted_text): # Split the text into lines lines = extracted_text.split('\n')

# Process each line to split into columns
table_data = [line.split('\t') for line in lines if line.strip()]

# Convert to DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame(table_data)

return df

def main(): # Simulate text extraction from PowerToys (replace with actual clipboard text) extracted_text = """ Column1\tColumn2\tColumn3 Data1\tData2\tData3 Data4\tData5\tData6 """

df = process_extracted_text(extracted_text)
print(df)
# Save to CSV or any other format if needed
df.to_csv('extracted_table.csv', index=False)

if name == "main": main() `