The Complete Type Shifter Tutorial

Prefer to watch? These short narrated videos walk through each part of Type Shifter, about a minute each, with captions on screen. They were recorded in the Windows desktop app; the web and Android apps work the same way, with the layout adjusted to fit the screen. The written guide below covers everything in more detail.

Type Shifter runs in three places, and they all share the same £29 licence and the same core features:

• Web app — typeshifter.com/app. Nothing to install, works on any operating system.
• Windows desktop app — works completely offline once installed, and adds Offline Translate.
• Android app — the same app on your phone or tablet.

Everything is free for 14 days. After that, the free version keeps the basics for as long as you like, and a one-time £29 licence unlocks the whole app for life. The AI Tools are a separate optional monthly add-on — everything else in this tutorial is included in the licence.

Throughout this guide, look for these labels:

• Free trial — usable during the 14-day trial and included in the licence.
• Free version — still yours after the trial, without buying anything.
• Licence — needs an activated £29 licence.
• AI add-on — needs a Tier 1 or Tier 2 subscription on top of the licence.
• Windows — desktop app only.

The app is a single screen with four parts. Knowing them makes the rest of this guide easy to follow.

• The sidebar, down the left. Six views: Import, Transform, Appearance, Read Aloud, Translate and Export. Clicking one changes what the panel on the right shows. Your document stays exactly where it is.
• Your document, in the middle. The whole point of the app: your text, formatted and ready to read. You can type straight into it, zoom it, and read it full screen.
• The panel, on the right. The controls for whichever view you picked. Choose a template and load a file in Import, switch on Bionic Reading in Transform, change fonts and colours in Appearance, pick a voice in Read Aloud, save a copy in Export.
• The toolbar, above the document. The things you want whatever you are doing: Clear, Copy, AI Tools, Undo, Redo, Highlights, the zoom controls, Hide Panel and Fullscreen.

Along the very top sit My Library, the name of the document you have open, the light and dark switch, your trial or licence badge, and Menu, which is where you enter a licence key and find help.

Click Import in the sidebar. The panel on the right shows TEMPLATE and UPLOAD FILE, and that is where everything starts. You bring a document to Type Shifter rather than typing into it, and there are three ways to do that.

Drop in a document

Drag a file onto the upload box, or click it to open the file picker. Supported formats: TXT, RTF, DOCX, PDF, MD (Markdown), EPUB and HTML. The maximum file size is 10 MB.

Paste a web page address

At the bottom of the upload box, under OR PASTE A URL, paste a link into the field and press Fetch or hit Enter. Type Shifter pulls in the article text so you can read it without adverts, pop-ups or a fixed layout.

Scan an image with OCR

Drop in a photo, screenshot or scanned page — JPG, PNG, WEBP, BMP, GIF or TIFF — and Type Shifter extracts the text automatically. Useful for photographs of book pages, printed letters, recipes, or a screenshot of something you can't select.

Scans are rarely perfect. If the result has broken words or stray characters, the ✨ Clean up with AI button tidies it up AI add-on — see step 9.

Press SHIFT MY TEXT, at the bottom of the Import panel. Your formatted, readable document appears in the middle of the screen, and its name appears along the top.

That document, in the middle, is where everything else in this tutorial happens. A few things worth knowing about it straight away:

• It's editable. Click anywhere in the output and type — fix a typo, delete a paragraph, rewrite a sentence.
• You can zoom. Use + and − to scale the text up or down without changing the document itself.
• You can go fullscreen with Fullscreen, or clear the sidebar, panel and toolbar out of the way with Hide Panel to read distraction-free. A Show Controls button brings them back.
• Reading statistics update as you go, at the foot of the Transform panel: word count, character count, estimated reading time, and estimated time with Bionic Reading on.

The TEMPLATE dropdown, at the top of the Import panel, holds 150 templates. Choosing one restyles the entire document in a single click.

Each template sets, all at once:

• A heading font, a subheading font and a body font that are designed to sit well together
• Text and heading colours, and the page background
• Sizes and spacing for each level of the document

They're grouped by purpose — business and corporate looks, academic and scholarly layouts, warm and friendly styles, bold startup designs, cookbooks, screenplays, comics and more. Try a few; switching is instant and nothing is lost.

A template is a starting point. Click Appearance in the sidebar to change any part of it. Every control updates the document live.

Fonts, per role

There are three font pickers — Heading, Subheading and Body — each searchable across 1,900+ Google Fonts. Set them independently, or leave any of them on the template default. This is how you keep a template's layout but swap in a typeface you find easier to read.

Sizes and colours

• Size for headings, subheadings and body text, set independently
• Colour for each of the three, via a colour picker or a hex code

Spacing

Three separate spacing controls, because different readers need different things:

• Line spacing — the gap between lines
• Letter spacing — the gap between characters, which many dyslexic readers find helps letters stop crowding together
• Word spacing — the gap between words

Alignment

Align Left, Align Center, Align Right or Justify for the document.

Formatting just part of the text

Select any passage in the document and a small toolbar appears, letting you change the font, size or colour of just that selection — handy for emphasising a quotation or a key definition without touching the rest of the document.

These are the features Type Shifter exists for, and they live together in the Transform view. They are all toggles: turn them on and off freely, and combine whichever ones help.

👁️ Bionic Reading

Bolds the first few letters of every word, creating fixation points your eye can anchor to while your brain fills in the rest. Turn it on with the Bionic toggle, then use the slider to set the intensity anywhere from 5% to 45% — the percentage of each word that gets bolded. Lower is subtler; higher is stronger. Around 40% suits most people, but it's worth experimenting.

🔤 Dyslexic mode

Switches the whole document to OpenDyslexic, a typeface with weighted bottoms designed to stop letters rotating or flipping as you read. It overrides all other font settings while it's on, and turning it off restores exactly what you had.

🌙 Dark Output

Flips the document itself to a dark background with light text, independently of the rest of the interface. Reduces glare for long reading sessions and in low light.

📏 Reading ruler

Puts a horizontal guide across the page that follows your pointer, so you always know which line you're on. Helps if you frequently lose your place or skip lines.

🎨 Colour overlays

Tints the page in cream, blue, rose, green, peach or grey — the digital equivalent of a coloured reading overlay. Readers with visual stress or Irlen-type symptoms often find one specific tint dramatically more comfortable than white. Try each; the difference is usually obvious.

🔀 Compare

Shows the original and the Bionic version side by side, so you can see exactly what the formatting is doing before committing to it.

Open Read Aloud in the sidebar and press Listen to have your document read to you, with 179 voices across 49 languages, all generated on your own device.

Choosing a voice

There are two engines, and you pick per document:

• Kokoro — 28 English voices across two accents and both genders. Very natural, and it uses punctuation to shape pacing and intonation. Downloads a voice model (around 80 MB) the first time you use it, then caches it forever.
• Piper — 151 voices spanning many more languages. Lighter and faster to start.

While it reads

Turn on the highlight option and the word or sentence being spoken is highlighted as it goes, so your eyes can follow along with your ears. That dual-channel approach is one of the most effective things you can do for comprehension and focus.

Saving as MP3

• 💾 Save Recording — saves what you've just listened to, or from the cursor to the end.
• 📥 Save Full Doc — generates the whole document as audio and saves it, without you having to listen through first.

Either way you get a normal MP3 file you can put on your phone, load into a podcast app, or listen to on a commute.

Select any passage and choose a highlight colour to mark it. Attach a note to a highlight if you want to record why it mattered.

Click Highlights in the toolbar above the document to see every highlight in one list, jump straight to any of them, or remove them individually. Highlights are saved with the document, so they're still there when you come back to it.

You can export your highlights and notes on their own — separately from the document — as ⬇ HTML or ⬇ Markdown. That gives you a clean set of study notes or research quotes without the surrounding text.

Every document you import is saved to My Library automatically. Open My Library at the top of the screen to see everything you have read and pick up where you left off.

Each entry remembers:

• The document itself, with its original formatting
• Your exact reading position — matched to the text you were reading, not a scroll position, so it survives changing the font, zoom or theme
• Your highlights and notes

Sync across your devices

Once you've activated your licence on a device, your library syncs automatically between the Windows app, the Android app and the web app. Start a report on your laptop, carry on reading it on your phone on the train, and it opens at the paragraph you stopped at.

• Up to 250 MB of synced content, across up to 3 devices per licence
• Sync runs in the background — there's no "sync now" button to press
• During the free trial nothing is uploaded at all; your library stays entirely on your device

Open AI Tools from the toolbar above the document. Everything here works on the document currently on screen.

✨ Summarize

Condenses the document to its key points. Good for triaging a long report before deciding whether to read all of it.

📖 Simplify

Rewrites the text at an easier reading level, keeping the meaning but shortening sentences and replacing jargon. Useful for dense academic or legal material.

💬 Ask a Question

Ask anything about the document and get an answer grounded in its contents — "what does it say about the deadline?", "what's the main argument?". There's a microphone button if you'd rather ask out loud than type.

🗂️ Flashcards

Generates question-and-answer pairs from the document, ready for revision. Copy them all out in one go with 📋 Copy All.

🖼️ Describe Images

Writes descriptions of pictures embedded in the document, so screen readers have something to announce and blind or low-vision readers aren't missing content.

✨ OCR Cleanup

Appears in the Import panel, under the upload box, rather than in the AI Tools menu, because it works on a raw scan before you shift it. Fixes the mangled words, broken line breaks and stray characters that OCR produces from a photograph.

Copying a result

Every AI result has a 📋 Copy button. It copies the text to your system clipboard — the same place Ctrl+C puts things — so you can paste it straight into Word, an email or your notes with Ctrl+V.

What it costs

Allowances reset each calendar month, and the tools show how much you've used. Cancel any time from the billing portal — your £29 licence and everything else in this tutorial are unaffected.

The Windows desktop app can translate a whole document into another language entirely on your own machine — no internet connection, no AI subscription, no monthly limit.

It's included free with every licence and is completely separate from the AI Tools. Because it runs locally, it's the right choice for anything confidential, and it works on a train or a plane with no signal.

The web app has its own version of the same idea, on the same engine Firefox uses for its built-in page translation. 46 languages translate inside your browser, free, with no limit and with nothing sent anywhere. The first time you pick one it downloads that language's model, usually 15 to 35 MB, and your browser keeps it, so after that the language works offline too. Choose it in the Translate view.

An article takes seconds. A book is more like ten to fifteen minutes, running in the background while the document fills in behind it, and Stop keeps whatever is finished.

A language with no browser model is simply not offered, rather than quietly turning into something you pay for. The Windows app translates from a much larger set of language packs, so that is the one to reach for when your language is not in the list.

The exports live in the Export view in the sidebar. Every format keeps the styling you've applied — your template, fonts, colours, dark mode and Bionic formatting all carry through.

Highlights and notes export separately, as PDF, Word or Markdown, from the Highlights window. See step 7.

All of these sit in the toolbar above the document.

• Undo / Redo, or Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y (Ctrl+Shift+Z also works). Covers typing, template changes, Appearance adjustments and selection formatting.
• Reset returns the Appearance controls to the current template's values.
• 🗑️ Clear empties the document and starts fresh.

That's the whole app. The fastest way to make it stick is to open a document you actually need to read and work through steps 1 to 6 on it.

• Open the web app — no install, works straight away
• Help Centre — troubleshooting and per-feature detail if something isn't behaving
• Blog — reading techniques, accessibility guides and workflow ideas
• Contact us — or email [email protected]