Microsoft has released a new update for PowerToys, an application that brings a variety of tools to customize your Windows experience. With version 0.62.0, big tech adds three new features that promise to improve users’ productivity: Screen Ruler, Quick Highlight and Text Extractor.
As its name suggests, the Screen Ruler allows select a specific portion of the screen to measure its height and width in pixels. The tool also has a smart mode that automatically checks the number of pixels between a vertical and horizontal range of colors — just position the cursor in the desired area.
Designed especially for people who want to type in a different language but have missing special characters on their keyboard, Quick Highlight lets you find letter variations — including currency symbols such as euro (€) — quickly by pressing and holding a key and , then immediately press the spacebar.
For example, if you want to enter the letter “ß” from the German alphabet, just hold the “S” key and quickly press the spacebar. A window will appear at the top of the screen with different variations of the character. To enter one of the options, it is necessary to press the spacebar until the variation is highlighted. Look:
Text Extractor, in turn, can be one of the most interesting tools in PowerToys. Inspired by Google Lens with a dash of Apple’s “Live Text”, this feature allows you to copy text into images, videos or any other area of Windows — as long as the operating system can recognize the characters.
The feature requires improvement, since still not as efficient at recognizing characters in real life images and may add incorrect spacing between characters. Using the image above as an example, the text copied to the clipboard was:
DIFFICULT ROA DS LEAD TO BE A UTIFUL DESTIN A TIONS.
PowerToys 0.62 is now available as an update for all Windows users. On a related note, in case you are one of the users who faced problems accessing their computers due to a system bug, Microsoft released a fix this Thursday morning (08).
