What Tex Does

Tex is a capture tool with an attached annotation canvas. A few smaller tools — OCR, screen recorder, color picker, QR generator and barcode scanner — hang off the same window and share the same capture pipeline.

Everything flows through the MainWindow. That window is both:

• the command surface (toolbar buttons, hotkey host, tray-menu target), and
• the edit surface (annotation canvas, sharing actions).

Three Phases

Every workflow in Tex fits into the same three phases:

  Capture  ─►  Annotate  ─►  Share
 (acquire)   (mark up)     (save / copy / email / pin / OCR)

A phase can be skipped. You can capture and immediately save (no annotation), or load a historical image from the history window (no re-capture). OCR and barcode scanning attach to the capture phase output without going through annotation.

In-Memory First

A freshly-captured image does not touch disk on its own:

• The image is placed onto the MainWindow canvas.
• It is optionally auto-copied to the clipboard (Capture.CopyToClipboard, default on).
• It is added to the in-memory capture history (ICaptureHistoryService).

Images only hit disk when:

• You explicitly Save (image file) or the app shuts down (flushes history to %APPDATA%\Tex\capture_history.json if History.PersistToDisk is on).
• A screen recording is produced — MP4 files always write directly to disk since they stream during capture.

This means the history survives restarts, but an image you never saved stays confined to your %APPDATA%\Tex\ folder and the Windows clipboard unless you actively export it.

Core Surfaces

The rest of this guide documents what happens inside each phase and how to tune it.