How to Copy Code From a Screenshot Without Breaking the Indentation

You want to copy code from a screenshot: a snippet someone shared in Slack, a slide, an old blog post with code as an image. Copying the words out is easy now. Getting working code out is a different problem, because the part that makes code run, its structure, is exactly what OCR throws away.

What goes wrong (a real test)

We took a screenshot of this small function in a light-theme editor:

Then we ran Apple's built-in text recognition on it, the same engine behind Live Text. Here's exactly what came back:

export async function addToCart(item, qty = 1) {
const cart = await loadCart();
const existing = cart.items.find((i) => i.id === item.id);
if (existing) {
existing.qty += aty;
} else {
cart.items.push(f ...item, qty });
}
if (cart.items.length > 50) {
throw new Error"Cart is full");
}
return saveCart (cart);
}

Every line is flush left. qty became aty, push({ became push(f, a parenthesis vanished from Error("Cart is full"), and a space crept into saveCart (cart). Two of those would stop the code running, and one (aty) would run and then fail at runtime, which is worse.

Python is worse still, because indentation is the logic. On a frame from a coding tutorial, OCR returned this (first five lines):

def fetch_users(session, limit=10):
url = "https://api.example.com/users"
resp = session.get (url, params={"limit": limit})
if resp.status_code != 200:
raise RuntimeError(f"failed: {resp.status_code)™)

No indentation, a } read as ), and a stray ™. Python won't even parse it.

Option 1: fix it by hand (free)

1. Copy the text with Live Text: open the screenshot in Preview, drag to select, press ⌘C.
2. Paste into your editor.
3. For brace languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C#, Go), run the formatter (Prettier, gofmt, your IDE's Reformat). It rebuilds indentation from the braces.
4. For Python or YAML, re-indent by hand. There's no way around it.
5. Read every line for character swaps. Search for aty-style typos, check quotes are straight (" not ”), and compare brackets.

This works for a few lines. For anything longer it's slow and easy to get wrong, which is why most people end up retyping.

Option 2: OCR with a code-repair step

Screenshot Text has a setting called Optimize for code. After the on-device OCR, a small open-source code model (Qwen2.5-Coder, running locally through llama.cpp) cleans up the result. It's instructed to fix only OCR damage: indentation, brackets, quotes and stray characters. It may not rename anything or change values.

On the two captures above, it returned:

export async function addToCart(item, qty = 1) {
    const cart = await loadCart();
    const existing = cart.items.find((i) => i.id === item.id);
    if (existing) {
        existing.qty += qty;
    } else {
        cart.items.push({ ...item, qty });
    }
    if (cart.items.length > 50) {
        throw new Error("Cart is full");
    }
    return saveCart(cart);
}

def fetch_users(session, limit=10):
    url = "https://api.example.com/users"
    resp = session.get(url, params={"limit": limit})
    if resp.status_code != 200:
        raise RuntimeError(f"failed: {resp.status_code}")
    users = [u for u in resp.json() if u['active']]
    return users[:limit]

The Python came back byte-for-byte identical to the original source and parses cleanly. The JavaScript matched too (the only difference is four-space instead of two-space indentation, which your formatter settles). Each took a few seconds on an M1 Mac, with nothing uploaded.

Tips for clean captures

• Select only the code. Line numbers, file tabs and the sentence above the snippet all confuse things. A tight box gives the best results.
• Zoom in first. Bigger text means fewer misreads. On a Retina screen, ⌘+ in the browser before capturing helps a lot.
• Watch for ambiguous characters. In fonts like Courier, l, 1 and I (and O and 0) can look identical. No repair step can know which one was meant. See why OCR breaks code.
• Use the right mode. Optimize for code is for code only. For prose, slides or documents, switch it off: the code model will try to "fix" plain sentences.

The short version

If you copy a line of code once a month, Live Text plus your formatter is fine. If you regularly lift code from screenshots, slides or paused tutorials, a capture with code repair saves the retyping and the typo hunt. Screenshot Text is free for 5 captures a day, so you can try it on your own screenshots first.

Weighing up tools? Here's how Screenshot Text compares with TextSniper on code, and the wider guide to extracting text from a screenshot on Mac.