why can't we take screenshots that include text? like a pdf. can't the os just detect where the text is off the application uses the standard library to draw out its text elements.

It sure can, but it's just out of scope for a standard system utility.

You could build that rather easily using GCP ML stuff, or a bit more complex if you want to handle it yourself.

Saving it into various data formats is another story. I don't really see the use case here tho, the document is digital already, just sent it over instead.

But the text is always included. How about a screenshot that discludes all text?

Dafuq I am reading.

Time to take my pills I guess.

Is this real Oo

Your que is OCR.

You can OCR it, then remove all recognized text, turn the rest into a PDF page, re-inject the text in textboxes and find the closest known font. I have no clue how to do any of that, but it seems very much possible.

PDF.js