melody0709/zencrop

An independent reimplementation of PowerToys Crop And Lock, featuring Always On Top, rich screenshot annotation, long screenshot, multi-engine OCR, an OCR dashboard, and anywhere translate

What it solves

ZenCrop is a standalone, enhanced version of the PowerToys Crop And Lock tool. It allows users to crop a specific part of any window and pin it as a separate, interactive sub-window on the screen. It specifically solves the "all-white screen" rendering bug found in the original PowerToys version when dealing with modern Windows applications (UWP/WinUI/XAML), ensuring these apps remain interactive and visible.

How it works

ZenCrop uses several rendering techniques to handle different window types:

  • Native Viewport Cropping: Manipulates the window region to bypass rendering bugs in UWP apps like Calculator or Settings.
  • Visual Tree Radar & Reparenting: Uses advanced reparenting and coordinate compensation to support WinUI 3 apps (like Paint) and Win32 apps with XAML components.
  • Thumbnail Mode: Creates a live DWM thumbnail of a target window, allowing it to be hidden from the taskbar while maintaining 60 FPS rendering.
  • AI Integration: Integrates multiple OCR engines (Windows OCR, PP-OCRv6, PaddleOCR-VL) and LLM providers for text recognition and translation.

Who it’s for

Windows users who need to keep a small, specific portion of an application window visible and pinned on top of other apps for reference or multitasking, as well as users who need advanced screenshot, OCR, and translation tools integrated into a single utility.

Highlights

  • Smart Reparenting: Supports interactive cropping of modern Windows apps that other tools cannot handle.
  • Multi-Engine OCR: Includes local ONNX and VLM-based OCR (PaddleOCR-VL) for complex layouts, formulas, and tables.
  • OCR Dashboard: A full workbench for batch OCR, PDF processing, and Markdown preview with KaTeX and Mermaid support.
  • Advanced Screenshots: Supports long scrolling screenshots and a rich annotation editor.
  • Selection Translation: Quick translation of selected text using machine translation or LLM providers.
  • Always On Top: Ability to pin any window on top with customizable borders.

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