wtf is hbot?

Hbot is a free, offline desktop app for Windows that turns a webcam or imported images into scanned, cleaned up documents, similar in spirit to phone scanning apps like CamScanner but without sending anything over the internet. It runs entirely on the user's own computer as a Python and PySide6 application. The app can detect the edges of a document held up to a webcam and automatically flatten out the perspective distortion, and it can auto capture a page once it is held steady, then re-arm itself when the page is turned. A book mode splits a two page spread into separate single pages at the center gutter. Once a page is captured, Hbot offers filters such as color correction, shadow removal, black and white, grayscale, and noise reduction, along with manual brightness and contrast controls and rotation. Corners of a detected page can be dragged and adjusted by hand before cropping. Beyond basic scanning, Hbot includes tools for marking up a page: drawing with a pen, marker, or highlighter, blurring out sensitive regions like ID numbers, adding a tiled watermark, and placing a signature either drawn by hand or stamped from a saved image file. It can also search for a word across a page using offline text recognition through Tesseract, with matches highlighted directly on the page. For managing documents, Hbot converts images to PDF and back, converts PDF files to Word documents, and can merge, split, rearrange, or delete pages within a document. It supports AES-256 password protection on PDFs with separate control over print and copy permissions. Setting it up requires Python 3.10 or newer, with Tesseract OCR as an optional extra install for the search feature. The project also includes a one click build script that packages the app into a standalone Windows installer, and it can be built into a ready-made executable through GitHub Actions without needing a Windows machine at all. Hbot is released under the MIT license, and it supports free code signing through the SignPath Foundation's open source program to avoid Windows SmartScreen warnings on first run.