Copying OCR text or saving it as a plain text file in Read
The simplest way out of Read by Zaweba: copy all the text to the clipboard or save a UTF-8 .txt file, with your corrections from the review included.
Plain text is the humblest output in Read by Zaweba and often the most useful. You can copy all the text to the clipboard with one command, or save it as a .txt file. Either way you get the words without any formatting, ready to paste into an email, a form, a search box, a spreadsheet cell or any document you like.
It's the right choice whenever the words matter and the look of the page doesn't.
Copying everything
After Read has read a picture, the text sits beside the page in the review. Copy all the text and it goes straight to the clipboard. Paste it wherever it needs to be.
For quick jobs, the screen text grab is even shorter. Press its hotkey (Win+Shift+T by default), drag round some text on screen, and Read copies the words for you without opening the window at all.
Saving a .txt file
Saving as text writes a .txt file in UTF-8 with a byte order mark. That detail matters more than it sounds. UTF-8 can hold every character Read can recognise: accents, the Welsh circumflexes, Greek, Cyrillic and the many other scripts in Read's 40+ languages. The byte order mark tells programs such as Notepad that the file is UTF-8, so accented letters open correctly instead of turning into odd symbols.
Fix it first, then copy
The text in the review is editable, and your edits are what get copied and saved. So it pays to check before you copy. With the Tesseract engine, words under 70 per cent confidence are shaded amber both on the picture and in the text. Press F8 to jump from one to the next. Click a word on the picture to find it in the text, and the other way round. A minute spent here saves hunting for mistakes after pasting.
Windows OCR gives no word confidences, so nothing is shaded when it was the engine. If the text matters, read it through, or use Read > Read again with Tesseract to get the shading.
Getting the shape right
Plain text has no columns or tables, so layout choices matter. In Paragraphs and columns mode, lines are joined into paragraphs, hyphens at line ends are rejoined, a blank line separates paragraphs and columns are read one after another. Single column, line by line keeps the page's own breaks instead. Pick the one that suits what you'll do with the text.
When plain text isn't enough
If the document has tables you want to keep, CSV will put them into rows of cells, on a best-effort basis. If you want headings, columns and page breaks, a .docx keeps far more of the structure. If you want the original page with searchable words, save a searchable PDF.
Text is also what the Batch tab can produce for a whole folder, either one combined file or one file per picture, alongside any other formats ticked on the Output tab.
Small habits that help
Name the .txt file after its source so you can find the original later. Keep the picture as well; text can't show you a signature, a stamp or a diagram. Read by Zaweba works entirely on your PC, so both stay with you.
