Once you’ve done that, OS X will kill the faulty PBoard process and re-establish it with a fresh one automatically. Click the “x” button at the top left of the window which represents ‘quit this process’ In the search results below, there should only be one result - a row listing the “pboard” process. Type “pboard” into the search box at the top rightĥ. So, to fix a stuck clipboard (pasteboard) problem, you simply need to:Ĥ. Instead, the correct process to kill is PBoard. Other websites incorrectly advise to kill the PBS process and restart it.Īpple’s manual page for PBS notes it is not related to the Pasteboard process. Searching for this issue online provides a lot of bad advice (one website I saw said “repair permissions and if that doesn’t work, reinstall the OS”… terrible advice.) One solution to this is to reboot the Mac, but since Mac OS X is generally so stable and doesn’t need to be periodically rebooted as a matter of course, rebooting a machine with many open apps and windows can be a hassle. Instead, when you ‘paste’ in any app, the clipboard always pastes back the last thing you successfully copied. For instance, you could try uploading the Word file, or maybe copying and pasting that image into a new Doc.Something has been bugging me with OS X for a while - sometimes the OS X clipboard (officially known as “pasteboard”) gets stuck and won’t accept any new ‘copied’ content. You may need to play around with how you get the images into a Google Doc. It is handy for maybe a single page or two. One trick though is to use Google Docs which has OCR built it. You can find OCR apps in the Mac App Store. Otherwise, an OCR app is usually used to process multiple pages of images, like a scanned contract or book. How much text are we talking about? If it is just a few words or sentences, even paragraphs, then it is probably quicker to just type it out. You would need to use an OCR app to process the image. The computer doesn’t see it as text, just colored pixels. It is just pixels in the image, like a landscape or person’s face.

You can’t select the text and copy it because it isn’t text. So this is text that happens to be visible inside a digital image? Like a photo or scan of a sign, card or document?

Copy text on mac