AutoHotkey Community

[vashk]

First post so I want to start off by saying AHK is a great tool and I've already written several useful scripts in a short time to help with RSI and other annoyances, so thank you Chris.

I'm trying to write a fast translation tool that grabs the text under the mouse and displays a tooltip in the target language*, but I'm missing a couple pieces. The biggest hurdle so far is sneaking the text off any part of the screen without resorting to OCR.

*by target language I mean if the text (based on its UTF-8 values) is in the user's native language it translates to a user-configurable language and if it is in any non-native language it translates to the user's native language

The idea of using MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) has been thrown around, and I already found it on the Planned Features page:

http://www.autohotkey.com/changelog/PendingChanges.htm

I have another suggestion, which is to use a 3rd party DLL by Deskperience. My idea would be to use MouseGetPos command in AHK and pass the resulting coordinates and HWND to the DLL's GetTextFromPoint method.**

**The WordCapture part of the project has been completed using this method. Thanks for the useful suggestions. I'll update when the project is finished in case anyone's interested.
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--v

[majkinetor]

Check out Active Accesibilty COM module.
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[vashk]

Thanks majkinetor...

Do you have a link for this Active Accessibility COM module? I tried searching the forums and AHK script sites but all I could find was this topic:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic21808.html&highlight=active+accessibility+com

I'll certainly be reading it in more detail.
I appreciate your help.

Edit:

If you mean Microsoft Active Accessibility itself, I'm already looking at that, as indicated in my first post. I modified the code Sean posted in the above topic to find everything MSAA could tell me about a control (using mouse hover and logging to file the results) and it's a step up from ControlGet, but it still doesn't provide enough information about what visible text actually is under the mouse.
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[Guest]

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic24234.html&highlight=accessibility+com

[vashk]

Thanks for the link. It turns out MSAA does not have the single-word granularity I'm looking for. I was able to write an AHK script using the 3rd party DLL I discussed previously which captures words from any part of the screen. I think it might be non-commercially distributable. Here's hoping for a free tool that can be distributed with a future version of AHK.

For anyone who's interested here's the code... it's really just a proof-of-concept.

[Sakurako]

Why not just use language code? ~

Link: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Languages.htm

[vashk]