Introduction to Tex
Tex is a Windows screenshot, annotation and productivity tool. It captures regions or whole screens, lets you mark them up inline on a drawing canvas, extracts text with Tesseract OCR, records the screen to MP4, and generates or scans QR codes — all from a single tray-based app with global hotkeys.
- Official name: Tex Screenshot Tool
- Publisher: Synthetik
- Version: 1.0.0
Everything runs locally. No cloud upload, no account required beyond license activation. Captures stay in memory in a capture history until you choose to save, copy, email or pin them.
What Can Tex Do?
| Area | Capability |
|---|---|
| Capture | Region, fullscreen and scrolling capture with optional 0/3/5/10 s delay |
| Annotate | 16+ tools on a SkiaSharp canvas — pen, shapes, text, step numbers, blur, pixelate |
| OCR | Tesseract 5.5.1 with 29 language packs, confidence scoring, optional preprocessing |
| Record | MP4 screen recording via Windows Media Foundation with hardware acceleration |
| QR and barcode | Generate QR codes (QRCoder) or scan 20+ barcode formats on a loaded capture (ZXing.Net) |
| Color picker | Global pixel sampler with 10x magnifier and HEX/RGB/HSL output |
| History | In-memory capture history persisted to disk across sessions |
| Share | Save (PNG/JPEG/BMP/WebP), copy to clipboard, attach to email, paste inline, pin always-on-top |
| Hotkeys | Six fully-configurable global hotkeys plus in-window shortcuts |
| UI modes | Full MainWindow with integrated toolbar, or compact DockPillWindow floating at bottom-center |
Who Is Tex For?
- Support and QA staff building reproducible bug reports
- Trainers and technical writers producing step-numbered tutorials
- Analysts extracting text from screens, PDFs or images that resist copy/paste
- Anyone needing to record a short process video without installing a separate recorder
What This Guide Covers
Read top-to-bottom for a first-time walkthrough, or jump to any section. The recommended path:
- Getting Started (you are here) — install, licensing, interface tour.
- Core Concepts — how captures flow through Tex from hotkey to share.
- Capturing Screenshots onwards — one chapter per feature area.
See the guide README.md for the full table of contents.