Turn photos, screenshots, receipts and scans into editable text for free. Includes tips for better accuracy and support for Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, English and more.
Retyping a paragraph from a screenshot, a textbook photo or a printed notice is boring and error-prone. OCR, short for optical character recognition, reads the letters in an image and gives you text you can copy, edit and search. Here is how to use it well.
The tool supports English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, French, Spanish and Simplified Chinese. Urdu and Arabic are written from right to left and use connected letters, which are harder for OCR than plain English, so give those images extra care: clean scans or screenshots work noticeably better than crooked phone photos.
OCR can be off by a character here and there. Look closely at numbers, names, email addresses and anything legal or financial. A single wrong digit in an account number or an amount matters far more than a typo in a sentence.
If your source is a multi-page scanned PDF rather than a single picture, use PDF to Text, which runs OCR page by page. Our guide How to Convert a PDF to Text explains the steps. To go the other way and keep photographed pages together, see How to Convert JPG to PDF.
The OCR runs in your browser, so your image is not uploaded for processing. On first use the tool may download language data, which is a general file and not your picture.
The Docsworker Image to Text tool supports English, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, French, Spanish and Simplified Chinese.
Standard OCR is built for printed text. Neat block letters sometimes work, but handwriting is usually unreliable, so expect to correct it by hand.
Usually the image is blurry, low contrast, tilted or in a different language from the one selected. Pick the correct language, use a sharper image and try again.
Related tools: PDF to Text (with OCR) · Image to PDF