This tool performs genuine optical character recognition using Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly port of the open-source Tesseract OCR engine, running fully inside your browser tab. Upload or drop an image containing printed text — a screenshot, scanned document, photo of a sign, or receipt — and the engine analyzes the pixels to detect and transcribe the characters it finds, no server round-trip required beyond the one-time download of the recognition engine itself. Results are generally strong for clear, high-contrast printed text and weaker for handwriting, stylized fonts, or low-resolution images.
No. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) is loaded once from a public CDN the first time you use this tool, but the image you upload and the text it extracts never leave your browser — recognition happens locally using WebAssembly.
The first run downloads the OCR engine and the trained-data file for your chosen language, which your browser then caches. Subsequent extractions in the same language reuse that cached data and run noticeably faster.
Use a sharp, well-lit, high-resolution image with good contrast between the text and background, make sure the text isn't rotated or skewed, and select the correct language before extracting — accuracy drops noticeably on blurry, low-contrast, or handwritten input.
Choose an image of a page, a sign, a screenshot or a photo of a document, pick the language the text is written in, and the tool reads it and hands back editable text. The recognition happens inside your browser, so the picture is never sent to a server.
The first time you use it, the recognition engine and the language data have to download, so the first run takes a little longer than later ones. After that it's quicker.
Clear, straight, well-lit images give the best results. Print does better than handwriting, and a sharp screenshot does better than a photo taken at an angle. If the output has odd characters, try a larger or cleaner version of the image, and check the language setting, because reading French text as English is a common cause of garbage.
Always proofread the result. Numbers and similar-looking characters (0 and O, 1 and l) are where recognition most often slips.