TextSnap for Windows
Copy text from anywhere on your screen.
Press Ctrl+Shift+2 and drag over the words you need: a scanned report, a PDF that won’t let you select, a video call, a picture. TextSnap reads them and puts them on your clipboard, ready to paste.
- Free
- Windows 10 and 11, including Snapdragon laptops
- Read on your computer, never uploaded
School report, summer term
Owen reads aloud with growing confidence and corrects most of his own errors. He finds it harder to explain what he has read.
He prefers to work with one adult and returns to a task when it is broken into short steps.
Three keys to remember
Install it in a minute
- Download and open it.TextSnap-Setup.exe installs for your own account, so it doesn’t ask for an administrator password.
- Choose how it starts.On the last screen, tick “Start TextSnap when Windows starts” if you want it ready every morning.
- Look for the icon.A blue square with four corners sits by the clock. Click it to capture, or right-click it for the history and settings.
Questions
Windows says it protected my PC. Is TextSnap safe?
Windows shows that message for new programs that aren’t yet signed with a publisher certificate. Click More info, then Run anyway. TextSnap runs on parts of Windows you already have (PowerShell and the Windows text recognition engine), and it doesn’t connect to the internet.
Where do my captures go?
To your clipboard and to a history file in your own user folder (AppData\Local\TextSnap). Nothing is sent anywhere. If you copy text with personal information, untick “Save captures to history” in the tray menu, or remove single captures from the history with Delete.
It read a word wrongly. What helps?
Select a little space around the text, and zoom the page in if the print is very small. If the text is in another language, choose it under Language in the tray menu. TextSnap offers the languages installed in Windows (Settings, Time and language, Language and region).
Can I keep the line breaks?
Yes, they are kept as they appear on screen. Untick “Keep line breaks” in the tray menu to join the lines into one paragraph, which suits pasting into a report.
How do I remove it?
Open Settings, Apps, Installed apps, find TextSnap and choose Uninstall. It asks whether to delete your history too.
TextSnap is free
It’s one of the Fetwell tools for EP work. If it saves you time, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi, which helps keep the tools free.