OCR Capabilities?

[Michael L]

Hello. I have been out of the Macro Express game for a few years and I believe the last version I used was ME4. I am now with a new company and have purchased ME6pro, so I am a bit out of touch with what is new.

 

I am working with an application that is not very macro friendly. Specifically, it is a GUI interface, accessible through Citrix with no text copying capabilities. If you refer to the screen shot I attached, the fields in red obviously cannot be copied, but I would really love to. The field in blue (or any open field) CAN be copied, but can only be pasted right back into the same program. If I try to use a "set string from clipboard" after it is copied, the string remains blank. If I try to manually flip to a notepad and paste, it pastes nothing. But if I copy the "$2.70" I circled, I can jump from field to field and paste it just fine.

 

That being said, does anyone know if ME6 has OCR capabilities yet?

Or... has anyone successfully used 3rd party OCR software in conjunction with ME to grab info from a screen and load it into variables?

Or... does anyone have a different suggestion on how I might capture this info? (Currently a lot of this info has to be entered by the user into prompts)

 

Thank you for any help that can be provided.

[rberq]

Are you are running ME on the local PC?  As I understand it, the problem is that the local PC sees only a "picture" of the application screen that physically exists on the Citrix server.  Therefore ME macros running locally do not have any "real" fields on the local screen to copy.  Is there a possibility of running ME on the Citrix server, probably in addition to running on the local PC?  Then on Citrix perhaps ME could extract fields and store them in a file accessible to the local PC via network disk or folder mapping.  Or paste the extracted data into an intermediary Notepad application on the server that is visible to the local PC.  Or maybe a (simpler} macro on the server could copy the entire screen and paste it into a file accessible to your local PC.  Then all the extraction could be done by a local macro, which presumably could type (not paste) into the application screen. 

 

Also, aren't there Citrix options that make the clipboard usable between host and client?  Or is that what you meant when you said no text copying capabilities? 

 

As for OCR, sorry, I have not found anything useful -- it seems that somebody must sell such a product by now.  Though ME running on the Citrix server itself might make OCR unnecessary....

[Cory]

rberg is right about the window analogy. If you can get MEP running on the machine that's actually running that program, you will have much better success. 

 

MEP does not have OCR.

 

I have used OCR programs with MEP before and had good luck to solve the older simpler CAPTCHA prompts. It was a free command line program called Tesseract and being command line driven made it much easier. But I can imagine there are many you could employ, even some free online ones, but I'd be careful what I used it for as there is a possibility that they copy your results looking for valuable data. 

 

You might print to a text file. 

 

You could export the data. 

 

I have Snagit. You can automate the PrintScreen button to capture the image then extract the text. This is what I got form your graphic. 

Date: |11/2/2022 Prc|c: (J0604
Thru: |11/2/2022 Alt Proc:
Mods: I Par: |Par
r
IN ACALCE T 0 RAL 1 MG	Qív: [3ÕÕ
DRUG/DETAIL C( Dx Ptr
Auth No: I
Accom Rate: f Billed: [" Lvl:
$.00
$127.80
Method: X
COB Be tails
OC Allowed: V	$.00	OC Co-Ins: T	OC Paid Rsn:	
OC Paid Amt: I	$ 00	OC Deduct: |	COB Pat Liab:	$.00
COB Bank Paid: F	COB Bank Rsn: I	OC Pd Surplus:	
Cov Charoe:[
P/icefA qindication Beta
Allowed Amt:P	i $2.70 J	Allowed Rsn: [ALW	Claim Status: |P - Payable
Total Not Cov:I	1 $.oo/	Not Cov Rsn: I	Proc Status: |U - Unposted (open)
T otal Copay: I	$.00	Copay Rsn: I	Company Code: |GMR
T otal Co-ins: I	$.00	Co-ins Rsn: I	G/L Ref: ¡OPS
Total Deduct: I	$.00	Deduct Rsn: I	Medical Def: ¡2BB2
Tot Prov Disc:!	$.00	Prov Disc Rsn: (	Adj Method: |AA
Withhold Amt: I	$.00	Withhold Rsn: |	Post Date: |
Net Amt:P	$2.70	Paid Net Amt:	Adjust Rsn: ¡CL025
Type of Svc: Claim Ind 1: f Claim Ind 2: f

 

[Michael L]

Thank you both for your responses! I am going to unpack bits and pieces of this info tomorrow and see if it brings me to a resolution. I do not have Snagit, but it seems that might be the solution to my problem. I do not care how messy that extracted text is. As long as the number(s) I need is in there, I will have no issue finding it.

[Cory]

You're welcome. Many other OCR solutions out there. Probably somehting better by now. Look around.