Read by ZawebaText from any picture, right on your PC.
Turn pictures, scans and photos into text you can edit and search. Reads the text in scans, phone photos, screenshots and scanned PDFs on your PC, and saves it as text, .docx, searchable PDF or CSV.
This version isn't signed for Windows yet: if SmartScreen warns you, choose More info › Run anyway. Why?
Read by Zaweba turns the text in pictures, screenshots, phone photos of documents and scanned PDFs into words you can edit, copy and search. It has two engines, Windows' own OCR and Tesseract 5, picks the better one for each job, then shows the picture and the text side by side so you can check them.
Phone photos are cleaned up first: Read finds the page, flattens it, removes shadows, turns it upright and straightens it. Save the result as plain text, a .docx document, a searchable PDF or CSV tables, or read a whole folder in the background. Nothing leaves your PC except language packs you choose to download.
Who it's for
- Offices turning letters, invoices and old paperwork into text
- Students copying quotes from photos of book pages
- Anyone who needs the text from a screenshot or picture
- People who would rather not upload documents to an online OCR site
Good to know
- Scanning works with WIA scanners connected to the PC
- WEBP and HEIC photos need Windows' image extensions from the Microsoft Store; Read tells you which
- Language packs download from Tesseract's official collection only when you choose them
- The daily update check is off until you turn it on in Settings
- Handwriting, low-resolution pictures and decorative fonts aren't read reliably
Private by design
- Works offline, with no account and no adverts.
- The daily update check is off until you turn it on in Settings; it sends only the app's name.
- Problem reports are sent only if you click Send.
Everything you need, nothing you don't.
Clean-up for phone photos
Finds the page, flattens it, removes shadows, turns it upright and straightens it before reading.
Check it side by side
Words Read is unsure of are shaded amber on the picture and in the text. Press F8 to jump to the next one.
Searchable PDFs
Scanned PDFs come back with an invisible text layer, so Ctrl+F finds words and you can copy them.
Grab text from the screen
Press a hotkey, drag round any text on screen and it is copied, ready to paste.
Batches in the background
Point Read at a folder and it works through every page while you carry on, into one document or a file per picture.
40+ languages
English is built in. Other languages download only when you ask, and several can be read together.
From a wonky photo to clean text
Take a picture of a letter at an angle, with a shadow across it, and Read finds the page, flattens it and evens out the light before reading. In tests, a phone photo of a letter came out at over 98 percent word accuracy; without clean-up the same photo gave nothing usable.
- Page found and flattened
- Shadows removed, page straightened
- Turned upright whichever way it was taken
Searchable PDFs from scans
Open a scanned PDF and Read lays every word over each page as invisible text. The page looks exactly as it did, but now search finds words and you can select and copy them. Any corrections you make in the review go into the text layer too.
- Pages look unchanged
- Search and copy work in any language
- Your corrections go into the PDF
The details
| Works on | Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) |
|---|---|
| Reads | PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, WEBP, HEIC and PDF, plus scanners and the clipboard |
| Saves | Plain text, .docx, searchable PDF and CSV tables (best effort), or copy to the clipboard |
| Engines | Windows OCR and Tesseract 5, chosen automatically or by you |
| Languages | English included; 40+ more to download |
| Version | Version 1.0.5 |
| Download | ZawebaRead-1.0.5.zip (90 MB): unzip and run, no installer |
| Licence | Free for everyone, with every feature included. No warranty |
Read FAQ
How accurate is it?
On a clean 300 dpi scan of a printed letter, over 98 percent of words came out exactly right, and Tesseract reached 99.5 percent. Handwriting and tiny or decorative text are much less reliable.
Does it work offline?
Yes, completely. The only downloads are language packs you choose, from Tesseract's official collection.
Can it read tables?
It can save tables as CSV on a best-effort basis: rows of words are split into cells at wide gaps. Check the result before relying on it.
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Try Read today.
Download Read by Zaweba: no account, no adverts, every feature included.