Nothing is more irritating than swapping back and forth between your computer and phone while trying to work and text someone. It's hard to stay in a good workflow and, depending on what else you need your phone for, your battery suffers. For years, Android phone users had no choice but to use other messaging apps if they wanted to chat with friends from their desktops. But if you didn't know, you can use Android Messages on your desktop browser to type. Google calls this Messages for Web.
It's important to note that your phone has to have service and your computer needs to be connected to a Wi-Fi network. (It doesn't necessarily need to be the same network, though.) If your phone is off, your computer doesn't have Wi-Fi or you're using airplane mode, you won't be able to use Messages for Web.
Messages is the default texting app for Pixel phones, but there's also a dedicated app anyone can download from the Google Play store to use instead of the default texting app on non-Google Android phones. Download notepad for mac. It's easy to use and there's no penalty from your carrier to switch apps.
For most of these factors, it makes little difference if your scanner is connected to a PC or a Mac. But there is one area in which Mac users are at a distinct disadvantage, and that is in software. You can use the Text to Speech feature to hear selected text read aloud in a Microsoft Office for Mac file. If you have not already done so, set up the Text to Speech feature. On the Apple menu, click System Preferences. Once the needed texts are selected, click 'Recover'. It will take a seconds to save the rescued text messages into files. Now you can use QuickLook, Numbers or Excel to get the data out of your CSV files. In fact, they are stored in plain text, and you actually can read them in any text editor.
As with Apple's iMessage, Messages for Web lets you carry on conversations from your computer screen. Note that you might have to re-pair your phone with your desktop from time to time.
Make sure your phone's Messages app is up to date before getting started. Let's do this!
How to set up Messages for Web on your computer
- Open a new browser tab or browser window on your computer (we recommend a window) and navigate to messages.google.com/web/. A QR code will appear.
- Open the Messages app on your phone.
- In Messages, tap Settings (the three dots in the upper right corner).
- Tap 'Messages for web.'
- Hold your phone a few inches from the QR code you see on your computer screen, making sure it fills the viewfinder on your phone screen.
- After you scan the QR code, your contacts will automatically populate on the screen, ready for you to start texting.
A few important tips
Note that the computer you're texting from won't save your information unless you toggle on Remember This Computer under the QR code before scanning. If you don't, you'll need to pair your devices every time. You'll only want to save your contacts if it's a personal laptop or desktop to protect your privacy.
If you do text on a public computer, make sure to sign out afterward. If you forget, you might get a notification on your phone letting you know that you're still logged in. You can also bookmark the website so it's easier to text when you need to.
Now playing:Watch this: Here's how to text from a PC or Mac using Android Messages
More than texts
Once you have Messages for Web set up on your computer, there's a lot you can do with it. Start by typing in the name of a friend or group and begin texting. You can also add a phone number. You'll receive texts on Messages for Web just as you would on your phone, and you'll see a notification banner in the upper right of your screen (and hear a ding) when a new message comes in.
Messages for Web supports much of what you can see and do with Android Messages on your phone. You can send your friends dozens of emojis, GIFs, photos, videos and stickers. You can also enable Dark Mode.
You won't be able to share your location, send or request funds with Google Pay, use voice-to-text, share contacts or attach a file. You also won't see predictive text suggestions. However, the time you'll save typing on your desktop while you work is well worth these few omissions.
Now playing:Watch this: Google Assistant makes your Android texts smarter
Originally published June 18, 2018.
Update, May 1: Clarifies the need for a Wi-Fi connection.
Update, May 1: Clarifies the need for a Wi-Fi connection.
Paper is still great for a lot of things. It’s lightweight, it’s fairly water-resistant, and is just about the best tool available for reducing the number of trees in the world. But it doesn’t sync with iCloud, and anything written on it is not searchable.
Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this dark age. You can scan all those clipped recipes, and those receipts, all those sheets and scraps you have laying around, and which annoy you until you ned one, at which point it disappears. Today, we’re going to use Readdle’s excellent Scanner Pro to turn your paper into pixels. You may be surprised at just how easy and useful this can be.
Sublime Text is a cross-platform code editor for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It comes with all the features you would expect from a powerful code editor and then some more. It looks beautiful and you can tweak the appearance to make it more comfortable for you. Program for typing letters on computer. Atom Text Editor has joined the list of best text editors for Mac and has already left its mark in being quite capable and powerful tool. Atom too is a free and open source text editing tool and is maintained through one of the well-known repository – GitHub. Without any doubt, if you are looking for a free text editor, TextMate is the best text editor for Mac. You may find many free text editors for Windows but there are very few free applications which are available for Mac and TextMate is one of them.
First, why scan instead of just snapping a picture? There are a few good reasons:
- It looks better. If you’re scanning an actual document, then a scanner app will produce a result as good as using a proper document scanner.
- It keeps the pictures out of your camera roll.
- OCR, or Optical Character Recognition. This is the big one. A scanner app will read any words in your picture and turn them into searchable text. If it’s a typed document, then the accuracy is almost perfect, but it can even work on hand-written text.
You can scan a whole lot more than just paper scraps and documents, too. Text recognition works on any picture containing text, in theory. If you see a poster for a concert you want to check out, scan it, and make it searchable. Scan articles from magazines you find in coffee shops, and copy out whole chunks of text later, or highlight passages you like in your PDF reader of choice. Pretty much anything can be scanned.
What about the menu hung outside a restaurant? How to search a page for specific text macbook pro. If you scan it instead of just snapping a photo, you will be able to find it in future, even if all you remember is that they had “carpaccio” of tofu among the appetizers. What about the teacher’s blackboard in your evening class? Why write all that stuff down when you can just snap a picture, and see it all in the original context any time you like?
Scan with Scanner Pro
Of all the scanner apps I’ve tried, Scanner Pro is my favorite. It’s clean, easy, fast, accurate, and never confuses me. It also has a lot of extra power if you need it, but works as a plain-old scan-and-forget app if that’s all you want. So let’s fire it up and scan a document.
First, find a bright spot in the room. Kidding! Scanner Pro uses the iPhone’s flash to illuminate the scan, so you can do it anywhere. This may be the only time you want to use a flash to take photo. What you will need is a background that contrasts with the paper you’re scanning, so the app can automatically find the edges of the paper.
Get Texts On Mac
![Readable Readable](https://scanmarker.com/wp-content/uploads/scanmarker-Air-scan-1-1.jpg)
I picked a magazine, in German, to show off some of Scanner Pro’s other neat tricks. To scan, just 3-D Touch the icon and tap New Scan, or launch the app and hit the big plus symbol. Then point your phone at the document and wait. The app detects the paper’s edges, and when it does it flashes the flash and snaps a pic. Here you can tell it what kind of document you’re scanning (a photo or a document, B&W or color). This only affects the final appearance.
If you have multiple pages or sheets, just flip through them, pointing the camera each time. It’s pretty fast. When you’re done, tap the icon at bottom right (the one with a number showing how many pages you’ve scanned). On this screen you can give the document a name. This takes a second and makes a huge difference in future, when trying to find something, so do it. You can also have the names generated automatically (visit the settings). I have it add the date to the name. Now, just hit save. Or you can share the new scan right away. More on that below.
Automatic text recognition
This is the best feature of scanning apps, I think, so you’ll want to switch it on. When I first purchased Scanner Pro, OCR was off by default. If that’s still the case, then you should visit the app’s settings (the cog icon, top left on the main screen). Tap Text Recognition (OCR), then tap Automatic Recognition, then pick the languages you want it to scan for. Only switch on the ones you’ll actually use regularly, otherwise you may slow things down as the app tries to figure out which language to use. I have German and English, for fairly obvious reasons.
How To Convert Pdf To Readable Text
When OCR is switched on, Scanner Pro will automatically convert any scans to text, if it can. You can always display the image as text to see how well it did (above). In text view, you can also copy snippets, or the whole thing, to the clipboard. For any serious work, you might consider exporting to the PDF app of your choice.
Sharing and saving your scans
![Machine readable text Machine readable text](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126388164/424976013.png)
Scans can be shared as PDFs or JPGs. PDFs keep the recognized text layer, whereas JPGs don’t. The app’s custom share sheet can send straight to Dropbox, Evernote, and others, as well as print and fax. Yes, fax. In 2017. It’ll cost you money (the price depends on country, and so on, and is shown before you send the fax), but it avoids a trip to… well, it avoids a trip to wherever they still have faxes.
You can also create customs “workflows.” These are presets to share documents to your choice of service. You can save to a particular Evernote note, for example, or send the scans in a custom mail template. I don’t bother. I just switch on iCloud Drive in the app’s settings, and let it save all my scans there. That way, I can access them from any app, and from my Mac. It also lets me find anything I’ve scanned with a simple Spotlight search, and I never have to manually save anything.
Turning your existening photos into scans
If you’ve been taking regular photos of your paper scraps until now, then you can still turn them into scans. To do this in Scanner Pro, you just need to hit the little radar icon at the top of the main screen. This scans your photos and picks out any it thinks may be papers, or other eligible subjects. Go ahead and tap any you want to import. It works just like with freshly-scanned images. One thing to note it that it will combine all selected images into one multi-page document, which means multiple visits to import lots of documents. Still, it’s a pretty great feature.
That’s it. Now you can keep scans out of your camera roll, all in one place, and you can easily find them again, even if you can only remember one or two words from the scanned document itself. Give it a try. It might not seem that useful as you’re doing it, but in the future, when you’re trying to find something important, you will be super-duper pleased that you made this (trivial) effort.