Image to Text (OCR)

This tool uses Tesseract.js — a JavaScript/WebAssembly port of Google's open-source Tesseract OCR engine, which has been in development since the 1980s and is one of the most accurate open-source OCR engines available. The engine is downloaded once from a CDN and then runs entirely inside your browser. No image data ever leaves your device.

The first time you run OCR, Tesseract.js needs to download the language data file (typically 2–10 MB for common languages, up to 40 MB for CJK languages like Chinese or Japanese). This is cached in your browser, so subsequent runs on the same language are much faster. You'll see the progress bar reflect the download stage.

The best results come from: high-resolution images (300 DPI or more), strong contrast between text and background (black text on white), horizontally aligned text (not rotated or skewed), and clean fonts without excessive stylisation. Screenshots of digital text typically achieve 95–99% confidence. Handwriting is not supported — Tesseract is designed for printed text only.

Page Type maps to Tesseract's PSM (Page Segmentation Mode). "Auto (full page)" works best for whole documents with paragraphs. "Block of text" is ideal for a section of content. "Single line" is perfect for extracting one line of text like a title, label, or caption. "Sparse text" works well for images where text is scattered, such as a receipt or form.

No — Tesseract is designed for printed and typed text only. Handwriting recognition requires a different kind of neural network model. For handwriting OCR you would need a dedicated service such as Google Vision API or Microsoft Azure Computer Vision. This tool focuses on printed text where it performs excellently.