Save words from unselectable text

Subtitles disappear before you can pause. Scanned PDFs are images, not text. Protected readers and app interfaces won't let you select at all. The exact places where you meet new words are often the places you can't copy from, which is why a copy-and-paste vocabulary habit quietly leaves so much behind.

It's a frustrating mismatch: the more immersive the content, the less likely you are to be able to grab a word from it. Saving words from unselectable text means treating what's on screen as readable in its own right, instead of giving up the moment there's nothing to highlight.

Video subtitles are the classic case. A line you'd love to keep is on screen for a second or two, and even a perfect pause leaves you with an image, not selectable text. Being able to capture words from video subtitles turns the fastest-moving source into one you can actually collect from.

Scanned PDFs and image-based readers are the slower, steadier version of the same problem. They look like documents but behave like pictures, so highlighting does nothing and the usual copy-from-image trick fails. The ability to save words from a scanned PDF, or to copy words from an image, is exactly what's missing in those moments.

Capecho recognizes the text you point at using macOS's built-in on-device text recognition, the engine behind Live Text, so a word becomes saveable whether or not it's selectable. Position the shortcut near the word, press it, and Capecho captures the word along with the sentence around it.

Because it works from the rendered text rather than the underlying document, the source format stops mattering. Subtitle, screenshot, locked reader, or app panel: if your eyes can read it, Capecho can capture it, and you get the word with its context rather than a lone term.

This isn't a tool that runs in the background. Recognition fires only at the instant you press the shortcut and returns just the text it reads — the screen image itself never reaches Capecho. There's no continuous scanning and nothing is uploaded; what Capecho keeps is the word and its sentence, not the image.

macOS gates this behind a permission it labels Screen Recording, but that's the operating system's name for the mechanism, not what Capecho does. Capecho never records or streams. And if you'd rather not grant it, a copy-paste mode reads only the selection you've copied, again only after you press the shortcut.

Recognition occasionally mis-reads a character, and sometimes the surrounding text includes something you'd rather not keep. So every capture opens a preview you can edit before saving: correct the word, adjust the sentence, or remove anything sensitive that happened to be nearby.

Nothing lands in your library until you approve it, which keeps the collection deliberate rather than accidental. Once saved, the word itself stays fixed for stable records, while the context sentence and its gloss remain editable whenever you want to refine how a word is framed.

A word you couldn't have copied still arrives fully formed. It comes with a free, unmetered word explanation built from the word alone, covering meaning, part of speech, distinct senses, pronunciation, and a macOS Dictionary handoff, and on your Mac it returns as an FSRS spaced-repetition card fronted by your own sentence, right before you'd forget.

English is the first quality-validated target, but you can capture and save other languages today, and you can export your context-rich cards to Anki or CSV at any time. A companion for reviewing on your phone is coming, so a phrase you rescued from a subtitle at your desk will be able to come back in a spare minute later.