What OCR does
Optical character recognition (OCR) converts text that appears inside an image into editable, selectable text. It is used to digitise printed documents, extract text from screenshots, copy text from a photo of a sign or receipt, and make scanned PDFs searchable. This tool runs the open-source Tesseract.js engine entirely inside your browser — the image and the extracted text never leave your device.
Supported languages
You can choose English, Hindi, Telugu, or a combined English+Hindi mode. Language data is downloaded once from a public CDN (about 5–15 MB per language) and cached by your browser afterwards. Only the language you choose is loaded, which keeps the tool fast. Other Indian languages are not included in this version; check back for updates.
Getting the best accuracy
OCR quality depends almost entirely on the quality of the input image. For best results: use a sharp, high-resolution photo or screenshot; make sure the text is upright (if the image is rotated, OCR will struggle); have strong contrast between text and background; and avoid heavy shadows, glare or perspective distortion. Screenshots and scans of printed documents are usually near-perfect; photos of handwriting, curved pages, or stylised fonts are much less reliable.
Handwriting and low-resolution images
Tesseract is designed for printed text and does not handle handwriting well. It may recognise some neatly written block capitals, but cursive handwriting often produces garbled output. If the source is a low-resolution image, upscaling it first with our Image Resizer sometimes helps, but it cannot create detail that was not captured. For OCR-sensitive work, always start from the highest-resolution scan or screenshot you have.
Common questions
Is my image uploaded? No. Both the image and the extracted text stay in your browser.
How accurate is it? For clean printed text, 95–99% is common. For handwriting or blurry photos, accuracy drops sharply. Always review the result before using it.
Can it read text from a PDF? Yes — first convert the PDF pages to images with our PDF to Images tool, then run OCR on each page.