OCR that actually works
Optical Character Recognition turns pictures of text into editable text. Quality depends on the input as much as the engine.
Before OCR, always
- Straighten the page (deskew).
- Boost contrast — pure black text on pure white background wins.
- Scan or photograph at ≥ 300 DPI when possible.
Engines
- Tesseract (in-browser) — free, private, ~90% accurate on clean printed text. Ships with 10 languages here.
- Server OCR (ocrmypdf) — same engine, but adds a searchable text layer to the original PDF.
- Cloud OCR (Google Vision, AWS Textract) — best on handwriting, tables and low-light photos, but costs money and uploads your file.
After OCR
Raw OCR always has broken words and hyphen artefacts. Run it through our AI OCR cleanup for a fluent result.
Tools: OCR image · Server OCR PDF.