About this tool
Optical character recognition (OCR) turns a picture of text into real, editable text. PDFly uses Tesseract, a well-known open-source OCR engine, compiled to run directly in your browser. Choose the language of the document — Arabic, French, English, or a mix — and the recognised text appears in an editable box.
The first run downloads the language data (a few megabytes), which is then cached by your browser. For best accuracy use a sharp, well-lit image where the text is straight.
How to extract text from an image
- 1
Add an image or scan
Photos, screenshots or a scanned PDF.
- 2
Choose the language
Pick the language (or pair of languages) used in the document.
- 3
Recognise
Press “Recognise text” and wait for the progress bar.
- 4
Copy or download
Edit, copy or save the text as a .txt file.
Questions about Image to Text (OCR)
How accurate is the OCR?
Printed text in a clear photo is usually recognised very well. Handwriting, low light and decorative fonts reduce accuracy.
Does it read Arabic?
Yes. Choose Arabic, or Arabic + French / Arabic + English for mixed documents.
Is my image sent to a server?
No. Only the language data is downloaded; recognition runs on your device.
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