OCR, short for optical character recognition, reads the letters in a picture and gives you text you can copy and edit. It saves retyping a receipt, a printed letter or a screenshot.
When it is useful
- Copying a paragraph from a photo of a book page or notice board.
- Pulling numbers from a receipt or bill.
- Grabbing text from a screenshot that cannot be selected.
- Making a scanned page easier to search and quote.
Steps
- Open the Image to Text tool.
- Add a picture that contains text.
- Choose the language of the text.
- Press Read the text, then copy or download the result.
The first run can take a little longer because the language data, a few MB, downloads once and is cached. Your picture is not uploaded. The reading happens on your device.
Choose the right language
The tool supports 27 languages. Picking the wrong one is the most common cause of garbled output. If a page mixes languages, run it once for each language and keep the best result.
How to get better accuracy
Good input matters more than anything else.
- Light. Photograph in even light. Avoid shadows across the page.
- Straight. Hold the camera directly above the page. Tilted text reads worse.
- Sharp. Tap to focus and hold still.
- Crop. Remove borders and unrelated parts with the crop image tool.
- Size. Very small text improves if you use a higher resolution photo.
Printed text in a plain font reads best. Handwriting, decorative fonts and low-quality photocopies are harder and may need fixing by hand.
Always proofread
OCR makes mistakes. Common ones are:
- Zero and the letter O swapped.
- One, lowercase L and capital I confused.
- Broken line breaks in the middle of sentences.
- Missing accents or punctuation.
Check numbers such as amounts, dates and account details against the original, because a single wrong digit can matter.
If your source is a PDF
If the text is already inside a PDF, you may not need OCR. Try the PDF to Text tool first. For scanned PDFs where the pages are pictures, convert pages to images with PDF to JPG and read them here.
Privacy
Because the text is read on your device, this is a reasonable choice for personal documents. Still, delete copies you no longer need.