If you want me to read some text, use your computer’s text-copy commands to provide me with the data rather than taking a screenshot. There are a lot of good reasons to do this.

Screen size variability

The sender won’t always know how to format a screenshot so the receiver can read it easily. I’m sure that you, too, have pinch-zoomed your way across a wide image on a narrow touchscreen. Pinch-zooming your way across a wide image filled with text can make reading a slow and error-prone process.

Reliability and rediscoverability

Raw text content will always be more searchable than images. This allows you and others to rediscover the text when it is useful again later on.

I know that OCR exists and text can be extracted from images and videos in an automated way now. Unfortunately, I know too well that OCR is lossy and can even produce text with comprehensive typos. So, searching for text content from OCRed images cannot be as reliable as raw text content. Yes, even if you throw an LLM in at the end to help normalize the OCRed text.

Text can be translated

It’s true that raw text and OCRed text can both be translated into other languages. But I’d always feel more confident throwing the raw text into translation software for the reasons given in my previous point.

Text can be transformed

If you want me to read some text, you may also want me to decode, decant, or edit the raw text.

Without any specialized software, our computers are still good at text editing. Being able to copy text from one application and paste it in another is beyond convenient. Not only can you transform the text content, you can transform its display to better see or make sense of it.

Without any specialized software, our computers are not great at duping, editing, or processing image content. Having to manually re-copy text from an image or video is less efficient.

Text is portable

Going a bit deeper on that last point: text is more portable than an image. Text takes up less disk space, can be trivially opened by many softwares on many systems. Text can be printed out on even the most rudimentary of printers.

Why?

As a software developer, I often participate in message threads in which someone wants to discuss a piece of code or documentation, or a shapeless stack of log messages. Some senders would post a screenshot containing a representation of the text rather than the raw text. I never enjoy this, especially when I’m reading from my phone.

There may be real reasons they did this:

  • The software being used makes it too difficult to reliably select text (cheers, iOS).
  • The software being used makes it too difficult to copy text (cheers, Tmux).

For anyone with these reasons, I recommend finding other software that allows you to more easily select and copy text. Or, I recommend learning the difficult-to-use software’s select- and copy-commands. Or, as a last resort, I recommend recopying manually the text content you wish to send me.

You may be the sender and the text’s secondary reader for now, but in the future you may be the text’s primary reader. Make reading the text easier for yourself.