Handpress: Assay user guide

Before you start

Assay shows you the turns of phrase that machine-written text leans on, and where they are in your writing. You decide what to change.

Assay does not know who wrote anything. It cannot tell a person from a machine and was never built to. A finding is a suggestion about phrasing, and nothing more. Never use it to accuse anybody of anything: someone who writes well can be flagged more often than someone who does not.

You need:

• A Windows computer. There is no Mac version yet.
• Your licence key, which is on the receipt page you saw after paying.
• An internet connection to activate Assay and for the AI read. The free checks work offline.

Install Assay

1. Open the receipt page from your purchase and press the download link beside your licence key. If you have lost that page, email orders@handpresstools.co.uk with your order reference and we will send the link again.
2. Run the file you downloaded. It installs Assay for your own Windows account, so it does not ask for an administrator password.
3. If Windows shows a blue box saying Windows protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway.

Windows shows that message for any installer it has not seen many times before, and it fades as more people install the same version.

Activate your licence

The first time Assay opens it asks for your licence key.

1. Type or paste the licence key from your receipt into the box.
2. Press Activate, or press Enter.

Assay sends the key to our licence server to check it, and the request carries the key and nothing else. After that it checks the key again whenever it opens with a connection. With no connection it works offline.

If activation does not work

One licence covers one person on up to two computers, for example a desktop and a laptop. To move to a new computer, install Assay there and use the same key.

The walkthrough

The first time Assay is ready to use, a short walkthrough points at each part of the screen and says what it does.

• Next or Enter moves to the next stop. Skip or Escape closes it.
• To see it again at any time, press the question mark in the top bar.
• User guide, at the bottom of the left-hand bar, copies the address of this page so you can paste it into your web browser.

Scan a piece of writing

Put your writing in

There are three ways to get writing into Assay:

• Paste it into the big box.
• Drag a file from your computer onto the box.
• Press Open a file and choose one.

Assay opens Word files (.docx), plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md) and web pages (.html). It does not open PDFs: open the PDF in Word or Google Docs, save a copy as .docx, and open that instead.

Every file is checked for hidden instructions the moment it opens. That check is free and runs on your computer. See Hidden instructions.

Also check typography

Below the buttons is a tick box called Also check typography. It is off unless you tick it. When it is on, Assay also flags en dashes, curly quotes, curly apostrophes and ellipsis characters. Word processors add those by themselves, so on their own they say nothing about who wrote a text, but some people want them gone. Em dashes are flagged either way.

Press Analyse

Press Analyse, or press Ctrl and Enter together while you are in the text box. Before every scan, Assay shows a short note about what a finding is.

Press I understand and the scan runs. The free scan uses no credits and sends nothing anywhere.

Assay reads English. Give it writing in another language and it says so instead of pretending to scan it, although the check for hidden instructions still runs.

Read the results

Overview

The Overview says how many words were analysed, how many findings there are and what kinds they are. Click any card to see just those findings.

There is no score and no percentage anywhere in Assay. If nothing turns up, it says that none of the patterns it looks for were found, and makes no claim about who wrote the text.

Findings

• Each group starts with the reason, and a Fix line saying what to do about it.
• Each row shows the flagged phrase, the line it is on and the words around it.
• Where the fix is certain, Assay shows the corrected sentence with a Copy this sentence button.
• If the same phrase turns up many times, it is shown once with a strip of line numbers, each of which jumps to its own place.
• Click any row to see it in your text on the Highlights screen.

Assay never changes your document. Make the changes in your own copy, or use Suggestions.

Highlights

Highlights shows your whole text with every flagged phrase marked. Click one and a panel opens with what was flagged, why, the fix, and the corrected sentence where there is one.

If a flagged word is simply a term from your field, press Always allow in that panel. Assay stops flagging it in this document and in every document after it. Allowed words appear as small labels above your text: click one to have it flagged again.

Hidden instructions and invisible characters

A file can carry text that a person never sees and a machine still reads. Sometimes that is harmless, like a note for a screen reader. Sometimes it is an instruction planted for whichever AI reads the file next, which is called prompt injection. Assay checks for it on every file, free and offline.

When something is found, a red bar appears above the screen and shows exactly what it found.

• A hidden passage is kept out of the scan and out of anything sent to the AI. There are innocent reasons for hidden text, so you can press Include it anyway to put it back, and Take it back out to undo that.
• Invisible characters, such as a zero-width space inside a word, are removed and cannot be put back, because nothing innocent needs them.

Some of these survive copy and paste, so pasted text is checked as well as files.

The Prompt Injection Scanner tab

This tab lists what was found, or says plainly that nothing was hidden. Underneath is the full list of what Assay looked for, including text hidden by styling, made transparent or too small to read, white text, text moved off the page, characters with no shape, and letters from other alphabets that look like English ones.

What it cannot see: a style sheet loaded from somewhere else or applied by a script, anything in a PDF, and notes left in HTML comments.

The AI read

The free scan matches patterns. The AI read goes further: it reads the whole piece, adds findings the rules cannot catch, and writes general observations about the writing.

Run it

1. After a scan, find the Read it with AI bar. It says what the read will cost before you press anything.
2. Press Read with AI, then I understand on the note that follows.
3. Wait while it reads. It normally takes ten to thirty seconds.

Your text goes to our Assay service and on to Anthropic to be read. Neither keeps it. Findings from the AI read are added to the ones the free scan found, never swapped for them.

What it costs

One press makes two reads, the findings and the general observations. Each read uses one credit for every 2,000 words, rounded up.

Running the read again on the same text costs the same again, and the bar says so. One read can take up to 20,000 words at a time. If a read fails, nothing is charged for it. If the reply cannot be matched to your text, Assay says That scan did not work and no credit is taken.

General observations

These are the notes an editor would write in the margin, not a judgement about who wrote anything. You will see:

• Read as: what kind of writing Assay thinks this is, which sets the standard for everything below it.
• Keep this: the line that is most yours, so you know what to protect.
• The one change worth making, with a passage shown as it stands and with that change made.
• Notes about the whole piece. Where a note quotes your text, click the quote to find it.
• Noticed and not counted, and What would make these notes wrong, which show the working.

Compare with the last draft

After an AI read, rewrite your text and scan the new version. A Compare with the last draft bar appears on the General observations screen, with its cost. Press it and Assay checks each earlier note against the rewrite and marks it done, part done or untouched, and says what is new.

Credits

Assay comes with 250 credits. They have no expiry date, and they are only used by the AI read. The free scan, the prompt injection scan and the hidden character check never use them.

You can see how many you have left on the AI read bar, and on the licence page.

When a read would need more than you have, the bar tells you before you press. If you run out, a bar explains what to do.

Buy more credits

1. Press Buy more credits on the AI read bar or the licence page, or Copy the link to buy credits on the out of credits bar. Assay copies a link.
2. Paste the link into your web browser. The page it opens already knows your key and checks it.
3. Press the button to buy 150 credits for £12.50 and pay.
4. The credits are added to the key you already have. Nothing needs changing in Assay.

Fix it and export

Suggestions

If the text came from an AI chat, press Copy the prompt and paste it into that chat. The prompt lists every finding and asks for those changes only, and your text is included at the bottom of it.

To make the changes yourself, press Export to Handpress. Handpress opens your document with every finding and observation attached.

Save a report

• Export report in the top bar, or Save the report on the Report screen, saves a report as a web page. Windows asks where to save it. It opens on any computer and prints well.
• Save the findings file, or Export to Handpress in the top bar, saves a small file ending in .assay.json. Open it in Handpress and the flagged phrases appear as highlights on your document.

Everything else

New scan

New scan in the top bar clears the text, the results and any warnings, ready for something else.

If Assay closed before you finished

Assay saves your work on this computer after every scan, every 20 seconds while there is text you have not scanned yet, and when it closes. Next time it opens, it offers Restore it or Discard. Nothing is uploaded to do this.

Updates

When a newer version of Assay is available, a bar appears when Assay opens. Press Copy download link, paste it into your web browser, and run the installer. Press Not now to hide the bar for that version.

One year of updates is included with your purchase. After that, renewing updates is optional and Assay keeps working without it.

Light and dark

The sun and moon button in the top bar switches between light and dark. Assay remembers your choice.

Your licence page

Press Keys on the AI read bar. The page shows your key, credits left and the version number. Save stores a key you type in, Forget it removes the key from this computer, and Buy more credits copies the link to buy more.

If you get stuck

What stays on your computer

• The free scan, the prompt injection scan and the hidden character check run on your computer and send nothing.
• The AI read sends your text to our Assay service and on to Anthropic to be read, only when you press it. Neither keeps your text or the quoted findings.
• Activation and the balance check send your licence key and nothing else.
• The update check sends nothing about you. It only asks what the latest version is.

The full detail is in the Privacy page.

Getting help

Email support@handpresstools.co.uk. We reply within 2 working days. It helps to include the version number from your licence page, what you were doing, and the exact message on screen. Never send your licence key in a screenshot.