Adding and preparing a book

Import a PDF or photos, get the text recognised, and check it before your child reads.

The Book Editor is where a book becomes something Zen Reader can score against. It is also the book's detail page — open it with Edit on a book in the Library.

Adding a book

1. In Library, tap + New book and give it a title and author.
2. Import the pages — a PDF on any device, or photographs of the pages on a phone or tablet. On Windows and Mac you import a PDF or image files rather than using a camera. Import from a folder saves a folder you use often — a synced Drive folder, say — so you can pick from it without browsing each time.
3. Set the type: Book (read page by page), List (flash cards & game) or Spelling list (school spelling sheet). See Your family library.

Importing into a book that already has pages asks where they go: at the end, before or after the page you are on, or replacing everything. If somebody has already read the book, Zen Reader warns you first — changing the page numbering can leave saved results pointing at the wrong page — and once a book has been read, only the Family Manager may replace or insert. Adding to the end is always allowed.

It saves as you go

There is no "nothing happens until you press Save". The editor saves your changes about a second after you stop typing, and a line in the toolbar says Saving…, All changes saved, or Couldn't save — will retry. That applies to anything the AI fills in for you as well, so review what it produced straight away rather than later.

The text is the thing that matters

Scoring works by comparing what your child said to what the page says. So the page's reference text has to be right. Zen Reader reads it off the page image for you, but you should skim it before the first read.

• Check each page's text against the picture of the page. Fix anything the recogniser misread — a wrong character here becomes a wrong "mistake" in the report later.
• Pinyin is generated for you, and you can have it polished by AI if you want. The phonetic-aid box only appears for a language Zen Reader can actually produce one for — where it cannot, the box is withheld rather than filled with a guess.
• The English translation is optional, and is what a parent who does not read Chinese will lean on in the reports.

Pages that are not the story

Tick not part of the reading on a title page, a copyright page, a contents page or an activity page. The page stays in the book, but it is skipped by reading practice and read-aloud, and left out of the reading level. Skipped pages carry a Not read badge in the page list.

This is the single most useful thing to do after importing a PDF — without it, your child is asked to read the publisher's imprint aloud.

Managing pages

Add pages scans with the camera or takes an image file. Each page can be replaced, moved up, down, to the front or to the end, or deleted.

Choosing how the text is recognised

The OCR tool picker offers more than one engine, and they suit different books. The on-device engine runs entirely on your computer and needs no internet; the cloud engines read text printed over illustrations better. Re-capture text redoes the page you are on and Re-capture all text redoes the book, so you can try one and compare.

The cloud engines, the translation and Auto-fill metadata (AI) all send something off the device, so they are covered by Settings → AI features. With that off, text recognition falls back to the on-device engine and the rest says it is unavailable rather than failing quietly. See Settings.

Lists and spelling lists

For a word list, Scan character list pulls one item per line off the page. For a school spelling sheet, Scan spelling list does the page you are on and Scan spelling list (all pages) does the lot.

Start a line with # to name a lesson or a list — "# 第一课", "# List 3". Those become the lessons you can pick between when practising.

A Singapore 听写 sheet usually prints the pinyin above each word, and Zen Reader reads that as well as the characters. Where the two disagree it says so before you save, naming the page, the item, what the sheet says and what the characters say. Check those against the page image: when they disagree it is nearly always the characters that were misread, not the pinyin, and a wrong character here becomes a word your child is marked wrong on all week.

Covers and book details

Cover — Import Image, or Select Page to use one of the book's own pages.

Details — title, author, edition, ISBN, subject tags and so on. Auto-fill metadata (AI) looks the book up and fills the fields in, telling you where it came from and how confident it is. Check it: an automatic lookup can be confidently wrong about an edition, and the editor is saving as you go.

Every detail field has a matching translation field, and Translate metadata (AI) fills those in.

Reading level

Zen Reader works out a reading level from the text and shows it on the library card, so you can pick something that fits. It is a guide, not a verdict — a book with few unique characters but long sentences can still be hard. Not every language has a scale yet; where there is none, Zen Reader says so rather than guessing.

For a Chinese book, Graded for chooses whose syllabus the level is measured against — one of your readers, or the family default. Two children on different syllabuses can legitimately get different levels for the same book.

Listening to a book

The Book Editor can read the book aloud with a synthetic voice, so a child can hear it first. Under Playback: Listen book works through the pages and turns them itself, Listen page does one page, Listen selection does a stretch you have picked out, and Loop repeats. The speed runs from very very slow to fast and starts at slow; it is remembered. The voice comes from the per-language default in Settings.

Echo reads a word or a line and then waits for your child to say it back. Read back chooses the unit, and Extra time to say it back adds a pause on top of the time the app already leaves. Nothing here is recorded or scored — the scored version of echo lives on the Reading screen.

If you are not an admin

A Reader sees a banner saying they can read the book and suggest corrections but not change it. Suggest this page's text and Suggest book details send a proposal to the Family Managers and Parents to approve — see Suggestions.

Two people editing at once

If somebody else changes a page while you have it open, Zen Reader tells you rather than letting one of you quietly overwrite the other. The pages it could not save are flagged; review them and save again.