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Guide
About the Image to Text (OCR)
Image to Text reads the words in a picture and gives them back as text you can copy, edit and search. It is OCR — optical character recognition — powered by Tesseract, the open-source engine originally built at HP and developed by Google, running inside your browser as WebAssembly.
Drop in a photo of a document, paste a screenshot, or open a scanned PDF. Every page is read on your own device: the files never leave your computer or phone, which makes it safe for contracts, receipts, IDs and anything else private.
Getting the most accurate text
OCR works best on sharp, evenly lit, straight images with dark text on a light background. Crop away anything that is not text, and photograph pages flat rather than at an angle. Screenshots usually read almost perfectly. The confidence figure next to each file is Tesseract's own estimate; below about 70%, check the text carefully.
English, Arabic and mixed pages
Choose the language the text is written in. For pages that mix English and Arabic, select both: Tesseract then considers both alphabets for every word. Each language downloads once (a few megabytes) and is kept in your browser for next time.
Scanned PDFs versus normal PDFs
A PDF made from a scanner or a phone camera is just pictures of pages, so you cannot select its text — that is what OCR is for. Each page is drawn at about 200 dpi and read in turn. If your PDF already has selectable text, copying it directly is faster and exact.
How to use it
- 1Choose the language of the text: English, Arabic or both.
- 2Drop in images or a scanned PDF, or paste a screenshot.
- 3Wait a moment while each page is read; progress is shown.
- 4Fix anything that needs it, then copy the text or download it as .txt.
Frequently asked questions
Is this OCR tool free?
Yes, with no sign-up, page limits or watermarks. The recognition runs on your device, so there is no server cost to pass on.
Are my images or PDFs uploaded?
No. Everything is processed in your browser. Only the OCR engine and language data are downloaded, once, from this site.
Does it support Arabic?
Yes. Choose Arabic, or both Arabic and English for mixed pages. Arabic text is shown right-to-left in the result.
Can it read handwriting?
Tesseract is designed for printed text. Neat handwriting sometimes works, but expect mistakes.
Why is the first use slower?
The first time, the browser downloads the OCR engine (about 4 MB) and the language data (about 2–3 MB per language). They are saved for later visits.
How do I fix text that comes out split into short lines?
Turn on Join lines into paragraphs. It rejoins the lines of each paragraph and words that were split with a hyphen at the end of a line.