Scan text shortcut

Tips & Tricks
1

I want to scan text from books I read (usually no more than a paragraph or two) to a particular draft.

Currently I have to tap in a draft on my iPhone, hit the arrow to scroll to the right, click AutoFill, and then click Scan Text.

Is there a way to create a “short cut” that I can add to the Keyboard-Basic Action bar?

As always, thanks in advance for any help you can be.

Harry

2

I suppose you could take a look at a URL step with…

drafts://scandocument?

… as a starting point and work from there, perhaps.

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3

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

I’ve never played with those. Any suggestions on how to get started?

4

You need to have a pro subscription.

Then read about editing and creating actions

And then about the Open URL step in particular

Then you create the single step action… or download it here

… but you should absolutely subscribe and learn how to build your own custom actions. You will be able to do so much more with Drafts as a result.

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5

Thanks. I do have a pro subscription.

Was hoping for some guidance on whether this is possible and what I should be looking for so I can build my own action if someone hasn’t built one already.

Even better if there was a way to add it to the action bar like the one for dictation. (In going through the guide and forums I couldn’t find anything about adding to the action bar.)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Harry

6

All of the above gives you the starting point and a prebuilt action to scan content into a new draft.

If you need to get the text into your current draft at the current cursor position, the cleanest option is a more advanced option - but if you read about scripting in the forum and in the documentation you should get th gist - like this.

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7

Thanks. Now I get it. I read your original reply in Outlook which magnified all the images and I missed that you’d kindly created an action.

I got the action to work, but it scans the full page with the camera, rather than giving me the option to select a particular paragraph.

Poking around a little suggests that this is a different Apple API. And the suggestion I found was to see if there was an editor.scanLiveText() or similar API method that mirrors the keyboard’s selective Scan Text. Is that something that would work, and if yes, any suggestions on how to do it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time to help me get a handle on this.

8

Unfortunately, Apple’s Live Text APIs do not support that type of integration with third party apps. You are stuck with the interface Apple provides, and it’s entry point in the text selection menu.

You can use the document scanning input, and just crop your image to the text selection you want to capture, however.

9

Thanks for letting me know. I had a feeling that was the case, but did come up with this IOS shortcut:

  1. Take Photo
  2. Extract from Photo
  3. Split Text from Image by New Lines
  4. Choose from Split Text
  5. Combine Selected Item with New Lines
  6. Copy Combined Text to clip board
  7. Append Combined Text to Combined Text (Drafts Action)

This turns the photo into a list that you can check off which paragraphs you want to add, and then brings up a list of Drafts so you can choose which one to append it to.

Hope that’s useful for others.

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