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If you've ever spotted a fabulous font in one of your Windows applications and wanted to use it in a word processing program, or if you've ever wished that a keyboard shortcut would allow you to copy the text from an error message, check out Kleptomania 2.1. This $29.95 text recognition and capture program from Structu Rise lets you do those things and more.

Using optical character recognition, Kleptomania can capture text from anywhere on your screen in Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000. You can grab just the text you want from folder directories, file lists, database reports, Windows dialog boxes, status lines, and other sources that don't copy readily to the Windows Clipboard. And, like a screen-capture tool, Kleptomania also lets you isolate on-screen graphics for copying and pasting.

Wordplay

During installation, you can select a keyboard shortcut that will activate Kleptomania's features (Ctrl-Shift, Ctrl-Alt, or Alt-Shift), or you can start the program by clicking the icon in the Windows Taskbar.

Structu Rise recommends that you have a system with a processor faster than 200 MHz and at least 32MB of RAM to minimize the lengthy font compilation/database process. However, my Pentium II-333 test PC had 32MB of RAM, and the process was still exceedingly slow. Fortunately, the actual capturing process proved quick.

Once you've spotted a portion of text you want to grab, you have several tools at your disposal. The Native text capture tool highlights text as a normal cursor would, and several different rectangular cropping tools allow you to select a particular portion of the text displayed on your screen. The program then supplies useful information about your text selection, such as font and point size, and word and character counts. Pasting text is a simple matter of pressing Ctrl-V.

When you paste text into a program to modify it or save it to disk, you can select from Simple Text format or Rich Text Format, or specify that the selected text retain its original font and point size. I tested that function with Microsoft Word, Lotus Word Pro, and basic ASCII-based e-mail. Oddly, pasted text sometimes displayed differently in each program, though technically the font and size remained the same.

Kleptomania's selection tools weren't quite as effective at capturing individual graphics; tool titles were frustratingly ambiguous, making it difficult to decide which tool to use for which purpose. For example, the Select Text/Graphics Rectangle rendered an icon as alphanumeric gibberish when I tried to copy and paste it. The only tool that effectively isolated the graphic was the Select Graphics Rectangle, a simple cropping tool not unlike those found in image editing programs. I tried pasting copied graphics within various programs, such as AOL 5.0 e-mail, Photoshop, and Paint Shop Pro. In each case, Ctrl-V deposited the image with no trouble. The image rendered cleanly and accurately in each case.