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Building ScreenTextCopy

This page covers building the app from source, producing the release artifacts, and how the installer is put together.

Requirements

Tool Needed for Install
.NET 8 SDK Everything Installer from Microsoft
Inno Setup 6 The installer only winget install --id JRSoftware.InnoSetup
Windows x64 Everything The project targets net8.0-windows, x64 only

One-time setup: fetch Tesseract

The OCR engine is not in git, on purpose: libtesseract-5.dll alone is about 106 MB, which is over GitHub's hard 100 MB per-file limit. Committing it would make the repository unclonable for many people.

git clone https://github.com/rezakazemifathi/ScreenTextCopy.git
cd ScreenTextCopy
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\fetch-tesseract.ps1

scripts\fetch-tesseract.ps1:

  1. Looks for an existing Tesseract 5 installation (on PATH or in the usual locations).
  2. Offers to install one with winget install --id UB-Mannheim.TesseractOCR if none is found.
  3. Copies tesseract.exe and its native DLLs into src\ScreenTextCopy\Tesseract.
  4. Downloads the eng, fas and ara models from tessdata_fast if they are missing.

The finished bundle is roughly 200 MB. Released builds already contain all of it, so end users never run this script.

Development loop

dotnet run --project src\ScreenTextCopy\ScreenTextCopy.csproj
dotnet build ScreenTextCopy.sln -c Debug
dotnet build ScreenTextCopy.sln -c Release

Producing the release artifacts

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\build-release.ps1 -Version 2.0.0

The script runs five steps in order:

  1. Environment check — verifies the .NET SDK is available and that the Tesseract bundle is in place, failing early with the fetch-tesseract.ps1 command if it is not.
  2. Publish — a self-contained win-x64 build into release\app.
  3. Payload verification — confirms the exe, the localization JSON files, the OCR engine and the eng/fas language data all made it into the output.
  4. Portable zip.
  5. Installer — invokes Inno Setup, if it can be found.

Finally it writes SHA256SUMS.txt covering every .exe and .zip in release\.

Output in release\ What it is
app\ The published, self-contained application
ScreenTextCopy-<ver>-win-x64-portable.zip Unzip-and-run build
ScreenTextCopy-Setup-<ver>-win-x64.exe The one-click installer
SHA256SUMS.txt Checksums for the above

Use -SkipInstaller to build only the app and the portable zip, which is useful when Inno Setup is not installed.

Why the publish flags are what they are

Flag Reason
--self-contained true Embeds the .NET 8 runtime, so end users need no prerequisites at all.
PublishSingleFile=false A single-file WPF bundle has to extract its native libraries on first launch, which makes startup noticeably slower.
PublishTrimmed=false WPF resolves types from XAML through reflection, so trimming silently breaks data binding at runtime rather than failing at build time.

How the installer is designed

installer\ScreenTextCopy.iss (Inno Setup 6) makes a few deliberate choices:

Setting Why
AppId={{7C4B1F42-9E3A-4D58-9F21-5B6A0C7E31D4} A stable AppId is what lets a new version upgrade the old one in place instead of installing side by side. Never change it between releases.
PrivilegesRequired=lowest with DefaultDirName={localappdata}\Programs\ScreenTextCopy The app downloads OCR language packs into <app>\Tesseract\tessdata. Inside Program Files that folder is read-only for a normal process, so installing a language would fail with access-denied. A per-user location keeps it writable and needs no UAC prompt.
ArchitecturesAllowed=x64compatible The app is x64-only: WPF plus 64-bit native Tesseract DLLs.
MinVersion=10.0 Windows 10 or newer.
CloseApplications=yes A running instance locks its own EXE; without this an upgrade fails halfway through the file copy.
Compression=lzma2/max, SolidCompression=yes Keeps a ~200 MB payload as small as practical.

The uninstaller removes the whole tessdata folder explicitly, because language packs downloaded after installation are not in its file list. It then asks whether to delete %AppData%\ScreenTextCopy (settings, API key, downloaded packs), with No as the default so reinstalling stays painless.

Cutting a release

  1. Bump <Version> in src\ScreenTextCopy\ScreenTextCopy.csproj.

  2. Add the release notes to CHANGELOG.md.

  3. Build the artifacts:

    powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\build-release.ps1 -Version 2.0.0

  4. Tag and push:

    git tag v2.0.0
git push origin v2.0.0

    The tag triggers .github\workflows\release.yml.

  5. Attach the contents of release\ to the GitHub release.

The installer is about 200 MB, which is far above git's comfortable range but well within the 2 GB per-asset limit for GitHub release assets. That is exactly why the binaries belong in Releases and not in the repository.

See also