Grab&Read

Grab&Read is a hotkey-driven, background OCR utility that captures regions of your screen and extracts text into a readable .txt file and a searchable .pdf.

It runs quietly in the system tray, listens for numpad hotkeys, and works with multi-monitor setups using native Windows screen capture.

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🚀 Features

• ✅ Hotkey capture via numpad
• ✅ Multi-monitor support using mss
• ✅ Frozen screen selector for drag-to-capture
• ✅ System tray menu with:
  • 📝 Config file editor
  • ✅ OCR toggle
  • 📄 PDF generation toggle
  • 🖼️ Screenshot-only mode when both are off
• ✅ Searchable multi-page PDF builder
• ✅ Screenshot popup with image preview

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⌨️ Hotkeys

Key	Action
Numpad 1	Capture Region 1 from config
Numpad 2	Capture Region 2 from config
Numpad 3	Click-and-drag custom region
Tray Menu	Enable/disable features or quit

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🛠 Setup

1. Install Tesseract OCR

Make sure you add the Tesseract tesseract.exe path to your config.

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2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt


<details>
<summary>📦 requirements.txt contents</summary>

```txt
pyautogui
pillow
keyboard
mouse
pytesseract
pystray
plyer
PyPDF2

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3. Create a config.json

{
  "tesseract_path": "C:/Path/To/tesseract.exe",
  "region1": [50, 250, 3150, 1050],
  "region2": [946, 298, 1550, 972],
  "output_text": "ocr_output.txt",
  "combined_pdf": "ocr_combined.pdf"
}

You can customize the capture regions or output paths here.

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▶️ Running the Tool

🖥️ Development Mode (with terminal):

python grab_and_read.py

🔕 Silent Background Mode (no terminal):

1. Rename your script:

   grab_and_read.pyw
   

2. Run it with:

   pythonw grab_and_read.pyw
   

3. The app will appear in your system tray. It will:

   • Listen for numpad hotkeys
   • Run OCR silently
   • Notify you when output is saved

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📁 Output Files

File/Folder	Purpose
captures/	Screenshot images
pdf_pages/	Temporary single-page OCR PDFs
ocr_output.txt	Plain text extracted from captures
ocr_combined.pdf	Searchable multi-page OCR PDF result

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📝 License

MIT – see LICENSE for full legal terms.

This project is open source and totally customizable.
You may use, modify, and redistribute it freely.

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Grab&Read was built for makers, testers, engineers, and techs who need quick, repeatable OCR from screens and processes — without interrupting workflow.