Image to Text Converter (OCR)

What is an image to text converter?

An image to text converter reads the letters inside a picture and turns them into editable text you can copy, search and paste. The technique is called OCR (optical character recognition). This free MavexTech tool lets you extract text from a photo of a document, a screenshot, a scanned page or a PDF without retyping it. It recognises English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Bengali, and you can tick several languages at once for mixed documents.

The OCR runs inside your browser using the open-source Tesseract engine (tesseract.js). The first time you use a language, your browser downloads the OCR engine and that language's trained model from a public CDN, roughly 2–20 MB depending on the language. After that, everything is processed on your device and your file is never uploaded to a server.

How to extract text from an image

1. Add your file — click the box to choose a JPG, PNG, WebP or BMP image or a PDF, drag the file onto the box, or copy a screenshot and press Ctrl+V on this page.
2. Choose the language — English is selected by default. Tick Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Bengali if your text is in that script. Tick two if the page mixes languages.
3. Pick pre-processing — Grayscale works for most images. Black & white helps with faint photocopies or coloured backgrounds.
4. Click Extract Text — the progress bar shows the model download (first time only) and then recognition progress.
5. Check and correct — the text appears in an editable box. Fix any wrong characters directly.
6. Copy or download — copy the result to your clipboard or save it as a UTF-8 .txt file.

How the OCR works

Tesseract uses an LSTM neural network trained on printed text for each language. The tool prepares your image before recognition:

• Upscaling: images narrower than 1,200 px are enlarged 2x, because Tesseract is most accurate when letters are around 20–40 px tall. A 600 px wide screenshot becomes 1,200 px.
• Grayscale: each pixel becomes 0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B, removing colour noise.
• Black & white: the tool computes an automatic threshold using Otsu's method (the grey level that best separates the dark text from the light background) and converts every pixel to pure black or white.
• PDF pages: each of the first 10 pages is rendered to an image with pdf.js and recognised one after another, with a "Page N" heading between pages.

The confidence figure is Tesseract's average word confidence for the page. Values above about 85% usually mean a clean result; below about 60% you should expect several errors.

Use cases

• Copying text from a screenshot of a website, chat or error message.
• Digitising printed notices, letters, receipts and bills to search or edit them.
• Extracting Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Bengali text from a scanned page or circular.
• Turning a scanned PDF (which has no selectable text) into plain text.
• Collecting quotes from photographed book pages for notes or study material.

Tips for better OCR accuracy

• Photograph the page flat, straight and in good light. Skewed or curved lines reduce accuracy.
• Crop away everything except the text before uploading; borders and pictures add noise.
• Select only the languages that are actually on the page. Extra languages slow recognition and can cause mix-ups.
• If the result is poor, try the Black & white option, or Original colours for coloured text on a coloured background.
• For a PDF that already has selectable text, our PDF to Text tool is faster and exact.

Limitations & notes

OCR is never perfect. Handwriting, decorative fonts, very small text, low-resolution photos, tables and multi-column layouts often produce errors or jumbled order. Indian scripts with conjunct letters are generally recognised less accurately than English, so proofread important text. Only the first 10 pages of a PDF are processed per run. The first run needs an internet connection to download the engine and language data from the jsDelivr CDN; the browser usually caches them for later visits.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this image to text converter free?

Yes. It is completely free with no sign-up and no limit on the number of images. Only the first 10 pages of a PDF are processed per run.

Are my images uploaded to a server?

No. The OCR engine and language model are downloaded to your browser, and recognition runs on your device. Your image or PDF is never sent anywhere.

Why is the first conversion slow?

The first time you use a language, your browser downloads the OCR engine and the trained language data, roughly 2 to 20 MB. Later runs reuse the cached files and start much faster.

Can it read Hindi, Gujarati and other Indian languages?

Yes. Tick Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Bengali. You can select more than one language for documents that mix, for example, English and Hindi.

Can it convert handwriting to text?

Only partly. Tesseract is trained on printed text, so neat block letters may work but joined or messy handwriting usually gives poor results.

How do I extract text from a scanned PDF?

Upload the PDF. The tool renders the first 10 pages as images and runs OCR on each one, separating pages with a Page N heading.

How can I improve accuracy?

Use a sharp, straight, well-lit image, crop to the text, choose only the correct languages and try the Black and white pre-processing option for faint scans.

Related tools

PDF to Text · Image Crop · Image Grayscale · PDF to JPG · Passport Size Photo Maker · Delete PDF Pages