We have all been there: you have a photo of a document, a screenshot full of text, or a scanned page, and you need to copy the words out. Retyping it all is slow and error-prone. Optical character recognition, or OCR, does it for you in seconds by reading the letters in an image and turning them into editable text.
When OCR is a lifesaver
- Copying text from a screenshot or photo you cannot select.
- Digitising an old printed document or receipt.
- Pulling a quote or address out of an image.
- Turning a scanned page into an editable file.
How to get the most accurate result
OCR is powerful but not magic. The clearer your image, the better it reads. Photograph the document straight on rather than at an angle, make sure it is well lit and in focus, and crop out anything that is not text. High-resolution images almost always produce cleaner results than blurry, low-light ones.
English, Urdu and beyond
Our Image to Text tool supports both English and Urdu, so you can pick the right language before you upload. Choosing the correct language matters, because the recognition model is tuned per language, and this is especially noticeable with Urdu script.
If your text is inside a PDF rather than a photo, and the PDF was created digitally, use the PDF to Text tool instead. It pulls out real, selectable text far more accurately than running OCR on a screenshot of it.
Everything runs in your browser, so your documents are never uploaded to a server. That makes OCR both fast and private, whether you are digitising a single receipt or a stack of notes.