Download WCopyfind

WCopyfind is free for anyone to use, for any purpose.

Your documents never leave your computer. WCopyfind works offline and keeps no copies.

Installing and running it

1. Download the .zip file above.
2. Unzip it: right-click the file in File Explorer and choose Extract All. Inside are WCopyfind.exe, a README, and the license.
3. Double-click WCopyfind.exe. There's nothing to install. Keep the program wherever you like; to remove it, just delete it.

Then follow the user guide. Upgrading from WCopyfind 5 or earlier? Your settings carry over automatically the first time you run 6.0.

Sample documents

WCopyfind-Samples.zip contains six short student essays on the Dust Bowl and an encyclopedia article, with some copying planted in them. The guide walks you through finding it.

Reading PDF files

WCopyfind reads PDF files much better with pdftotext.exe, a free converter from the Xpdf project:

1. Go to the Xpdf download page and download the Xpdf command line tools for Windows.
2. Unzip them and find pdftotext.exe in the bin64 folder.
3. Copy pdftotext.exe into the same folder as WCopyfind.exe. WCopyfind uses it automatically from then on.

A PDF made by scanning paper contains only pictures of text. To compare it, run it through OCR (text recognition) first, for example in Adobe Acrobat, and save the result as text.

System requirements

• 64-bit Windows 10 or Windows 11
• Memory: enough for your documents. A few hundred papers need very little; hundreds of thousands of documents need several gigabytes.
• A web browser to view the reports (any modern one)

Mac and Linux: WCopyfind is a Windows program, but users have run it successfully with Wine and in Windows virtual machines.

Source code

WCopyfind is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The complete source code is on GitHub, where every release is tagged. It's written in C++ with Microsoft's MFC library and builds with Visual Studio 2022 or later.

WCopyfind 5.0.0, the previous version

If WCopyfind 6 gives you trouble, or you simply prefer the older window and reports, WCopyfind 5.0.0 is still here. It uses the same settings, in the classic single-window layout, and makes the older style of report.

It runs the same way: unzip it and double-click WCopyfind.exe. Versions 5 and 6 keep separate settings, so you can keep both, in different folders, and use whichever you like. If you do, please tell us what sent you back to version 5, so we can fix it. The same file is also on GitHub, with its source code.

Older versions

Most people should use the current version. Older versions remain available for special needs, such as very old Windows computers.

• WCopyfind 5.0.0 (February 2026): see above
• WCopyfind 4.1.5 (April 2016): 32-bit · 64-bit · source · source on GitHub
• WCopyfind 4.1.4: 32-bit · 64-bit · source
• WCopyfind 4.1.3: 32-bit · 64-bit
• WCopyfind 4.1.2: 32-bit · 64-bit
• WCopyfind 4.1.1: 32-bit · 64-bit
• WCopyfind 3.0.2: program · source
• WCopyfind 3.0.1: program
• WCopyfind 3.0: program · source
• WCopyfind 2.7: program · source · instructions (PDF)

Copyfind, the command-line version

Copyfind 4.1.5 uses the same comparison engine as WCopyfind 4.1.5 but reads its instructions from a script, so it can run thousands of comparisons unattended. It hasn't been updated since 2016.

• Copyfind 4.1.5 (32-bit) · 64-bit · source
• A commented sample script and the Shakespeare sonnets it compares

To try it, unzip the sonnets into a folder, put Copyfind and script.txt there, edit the folder names in the script to match your computer, and run Copyfind.4.1.5.exe < script.txt in a Command Prompt.