Frequently Asked Questions

Version 1.5 April 01, 2008



Q1: What operating systems GetWord supports?
A: GetWord supports the following operating systems:
  1. Windows 2000 series: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server
  2. Windows XP series: Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional
  3. Windows Server 2003 series
  4. Windows Vista series: Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Small Business, Windows Vista Professional, Windows Vista Enterprise
  5. Windows 7 series: Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows7 Ultimate
  6. Windows Server 2008 series

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Q2: What software development environments and what programming languages GetWord supports?
A:
GetWord supports all the popular software development environments, such as Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Delphi 7, C++ Builder, etc. GetWord supports all the popular programming languages, such as C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. In a word, GetWord supports all the software development environments and programming languages which support raw Dll or ActiveX calling interfaces.
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Q3: What languages GetWord supports?
A:
GetWord supports all the main languages, such as English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Korean, etc.
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Q4: Does GetWord support Unicode?
A: 
Yes, GetWord supports Unicode. It can capture text from software systems in Unicode encoding. Also all the GetWord API functions are Unicode compatible.
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Q5: Does GetWord support capturing text at a given position? How can I retrieve the position of the mouse cursor and the caret position?
A: 
GetWord supports capturing text at a given position. You can use its API function GetString to capture the string at a given point. You can use Windows' API function GetCursorPos and GetCaretPos to retrieve the mouse cursor position and the caret position respectively.
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Q6: Does GetWord support capturing sentences? Is there a way to capture multiple lines of text?
A: 
Yes. GetWord supports capturing sentences. You can use GetRectString or GetRectStringPairs to capture all the lines of text in a given rectangle.
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Q7: I find GetWord uses an internal formatter when I use GetRectString function. I want to control the output of the captured text and make my own formatter. Is there a way to do this?
A:
Yes. You can use GetRectStringPairs to retrieve all the sub-strings and their corresponding sub-rectangles, so that you can make your own formatter and control the text output result freely.
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Q8: Is GetWord compatible with the popular software systems?
A:
Yes. GetWord is compatible with most of the popular software systems. It can capture text from all the standard Windows Controls, such as Dialog, Toolbar, Menu, EditBox, ComboBox, ListBox, TreeCtrl, etc
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Q9: Can GetWord capture invisible text in the form or dialog?
A:
No. GetWord only captures the visible text drawn on the screen.
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Q10: Can GetWord capture text from applications based on Java?
A:
GetWord only partially supports capturing text from Java applications. It can capture text from applications based on SWT or AWT, and it can not capture text from applications based on Swing. In a word, it only works for those Java applications which draw text using Windows native text-drawing APIs.
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Q11: Does GetWord support hotkey capturing? I want to set Alt+Left mouse button as the capturing hotkey. Is it possible?
A:
GetWord supports hotkey capturing. You can use EnableHotkeyCapture to set any combination of keys and mouse buttons as the capturing hotkey.
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Q12: Sometimes the captured text are all wrong characters, and are all question mark characters (for example, ????). What's the problem?
A:
GetWord returns the captured string in Unicode format. You need to use the Unicode compiling switch instead of the ANSI compiling switch to rebuild your application to display Unicode characters correctly.

How to enable Unicode compiling switch in various development environments.

Visual C++ 6.0 (VC6)

Open your project file (*.dsw) with Visual C++ 6.0 IDE. Click "Project"->"Settings" to open the "Project Settings" dialog, click "C/C++" tab. In the "Preprocessor definitions" textbox, replace _MBCS with _UNICODE (Pic.1). Click the "Link" tab, in the "Entry-point symbol" textbox, input wWinMainCRTStartup (Pic.2).

 

Pic.1

 

Pic.2

Please see the sample Samples\ActiveX_Demo\VC6Demo for more details.

Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6)

VB6 's default controls (such as textbox, label, button, etc) do not support Unicode. All these controls are ANSI-based. You need to use another group of controls which supports Unicode if you want to display Unicode strings in VB6. Microsoft gives a solution as follows:

Q193540: How To Read and Display UNICODE String on Visual Basic Form

It is not a trivial task, needs quite a lot of tricks and efforts to display Unicode strings in VB6. We suggest you use VB2005, which has good compatibility for Unicode.

Borland C++ Builder 6.0 (BCB6)

BCB6 's default controls (such as textbox, label, button, etc) do not support Unicode. All these controls are ANSI-based. You need to use another group of controls which supports Unicode if you want to display Unicode strings in BCB6.  You can use TntUnicodeControls to do this. Please see the sample Samples\ActiveX_Demo\BCB6Demo_Unicode for more details.

Borland Delphi 7.0 (Delphi7)

Delphi7 's default controls (such as textbox, label, button, etc) do not support Unicode. All these controls are ANSI-based. You need to use another group of controls which supports Unicode if you want to display Unicode strings in Delphi7.  You can use TntUnicodeControls to do this. Please see the sample Samples\ActiveX_Demo\Delphi7Demo_Unicode for more details.

Visual C# 2005 (C#2005)

C# 2005 has default support for Unicode. There is no need to do any special settings for it.

Visual Basic 2005 (VB2005)

VB 2005 has default support for Unicode. There is no need to do any special settings for it.

Visual C++ 2005 (VC2005)

Open the solution file (*.sln). In the "Solution Explorer" view, right click the project, and select "Properties"  from the popup menu.  Select "Configuration Properties"->"General" in the left pane, choose "Use Unicode Character Set" for the "Character Set" in the "Project Defaults" category in the right pane (Pic.3).

Pic.3

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Q13: Is it possible to define multiple coordinates on screen or a specific window, and auto-capture corresponding text strings on screen?
A:
Yes, it is possible. You can do a loop. On each loop pick up a coordinate and pass it to GetWord's API function GetString to capture the string.
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Q14: I want to buy the complete source code of GetWord. What the programming language it uses?
A:
All the source code of GetWord library is written by C++ programming language, and the total source code is well organized and commented.
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Q15: I need some customization feature based on GetWord. Do you provide customization service?
A:
Yes. We provide customization feature based on GetWord. If the customization is simple, we will do the customization for you for free. If it is complicated, you need to pay us a customization fee. What the customization fee is depends on what the customization feature is.
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Q16: I want to capture the complete word at a given point (for example, cursor position), but GetWord give me the total text on the horizontal line. What's the problem?
A: 
Let you want to capture the text at a given position, for example, the mouse cursor position. Let the line text is " Many people use Google to search things. Google is a great searching engine." If you put the mouse cursor on the 'o' of the second Google, GetWord will return: 1. the total string: Many people use Google to search things. Google is a great searching engine. 2. the cursor position: 42

In our demo program (You can find it at http://www.textcapture.com), you will find the two items as 'All Text' and 'Cursor Pos' respectively. 'Cursor Text' is calculated according to the total string and the cursor position.

Generally, if you want to capture the complete word or phrase at a given point, you need a dictionary which contains the words or phrases you want to recognize. When you get the total string and the point position in the string, you can look up the dictionary to determine what should be returned. For some simple cases, you can use regular expression instead of a dictionary to judge what should be returned directly. Say, if you want to use GetWord to recognize the phone number on web pages. Let the phone number string is "Our phone number is +86-10-80906058", you put mouse cursor on any letter of the string '+86-10-80906058' and want to get the phone number '861080906058'. This can be done with a simple regular expression searching program. We offered a such demo - Samples\PlugIn_Demo\Token, which could can the English or Chinese word at the given point.
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Q17: I am building the Unicode version in Visual C++ 6.0, the linker complains the error message "libcmtd.lib(wincrt0.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16". What's the problem?   
A:
You need to set the Entry-point symbol. You can do this according to the following steps:  (Please see Q12 for more details.)
1. open the project file (*.dsw)
2. click "Project"->"Settings..." to open the "Project Settings" dialog
3. click the "Link" tab and select "Output" in the "Category" combobox
4. input wWinMainCRTStartup in the "Entry-point symbol" textbox.
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Q18: When I use the latest GetWord library, the compiler complains that some function(s) is/are not available. What's the problem?
A:
The latest GetWord library adds new API function(s). You need to re-add the reference to the latest GetWord control.
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Q19: Why I can not use the PDF text capturing feature?
A:
GetWord can support PDF text capturing on all versions of Adobe Acrobat Standard, Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe Acrobat Reader(7.0 or above). If you can not capture text on PDF files, please check the following possible reasons:
1. Make sure you are using GetWord v2.0 or above. GetWord v1.x does not support PDF text capturing;
2. Make sure you have installed the PDF text capturing plugin properly. Please run install_plugin.exe to installl this plugin. You should close your Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader software before running install_plugin.exe;
3. If you are using Acrobat Professional, it maybe contains a program named Autotray.exe, please shut down this process in Windows' Process Manager if it is running, then run install_plugin.exe again;
4. The text you are reading is in graphic format. GetWord can not capture text from graphic images;
5. Currently you are using a limited user account, and you can not write files to the installation folder of Adobe Acrobat/Acrobat Reader. Please log in with an Administrator account, and run install_plugin.exe again. You can run GetWord properly without Administrative privilege after you have installed the PDF text capturing plugin and registered the text capturing library properly.
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Q20: I can not capture text from MSN Messenger. What's the problem?
A:
Some anti-virus software or firewall software maybe mistake some legal programs as virus or trojan. Please check whether GetWord is in the black list (prohibit list) of your anti-virus or firewall software. If it is in the black list, please remove it and add it to the white list (allow list).

Some anti-virus software or firewall software has one feature which can protect some special software and prohibit other programs from modifing them. Since we need to capture text from other applications, we must inject our capturing code into the process we want to capture text from. If your anti-virus software or firewall software prohibit other program from modifing MSN Messenger, you will not capture text from it any more. Disable the check for MSN Messenger in your antivirus software or firewall software will solve this problem.
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