Read by Zaweba on Mac and Linux
Read by Zaweba also runs on macOS and Linux, with Tesseract 5 everywhere, macOS's own recognition as a second engine on a Mac, and the screen text grab.
Text recognition isn't only a Windows job, and Read by Zaweba isn't only a Windows app. The same app exists for macOS and Linux, built with Avalonia, a toolkit that runs on both. It reads with Tesseract 5.0.0 on every system, uses macOS's own text recognition as a second engine on a Mac, and keeps the screen text grab.
If you work across machines, or have moved from Windows, you get the same way of working on each.
What comes across
The heart of Read is the same. Tesseract 5.0.0 does the reading on every system, with its layout analysis and a confidence for every word. On Windows, Read's second engine is Windows OCR; on a Mac, the second engine is macOS's own recognition. On Linux, Tesseract does the work.
The screen text grab comes across too: grab an area of the screen, and the words in it are read and copied, ready to paste. It's the feature many people use most, for error messages, text in pictures and anything else on screen that can't be selected.
Installing it
Read for Mac comes as a .dmg or a .zip. For Linux there's an .AppImage, a .deb and a .tar.gz, so you can choose what suits your system: the AppImage runs on its own without installing, the .deb suits Debian and Ubuntu-based systems, and the .tar.gz is there for everything else.
Getting good results on any system
The advice is the same wherever you run Read. Start from a clear picture: a scan at a sensible resolution, or a photo taken square on in even light. Handwriting, low-resolution pictures and decorative fonts aren't reliable on any system. Check the text beside the picture before relying on it, paying special attention to numbers, names and anything you'll pass on to someone else.
If you need a language other than English, the same principle holds as on Windows: Tesseract supports 40+ languages, and several can be read together.
Why a desktop app at all
Plenty of online services will read a picture for you. The trouble is that the pictures people most want read are often private: letters, statements, forms, notes from a meeting. Read keeps the work on your own computer, on whichever system you use. On Windows, nothing leaves the PC except language packs you choose to download, and the update check is off until you turn it on.
Moving between systems
If you use Read on Windows at work and on a Mac or Linux machine at home, the habits carry over: get the picture in, check the text, copy or save it. Some parts of Read rest on things only Windows has, such as scanning through WIA and the Windows OCR engine, so if you rely on one of those, check how your other system handles the same job before depending on it.
Read by Zaweba is free software, with no account to create on any system. Install it on each machine you use, keep a few test pages handy, such as a clean letter and a phone photo of a page, and try them on each system so you know what to expect before a real job comes along.
