How to Extract Text from an Image or PDF (OCR)
A photo of a document, a screenshot, a scanned PDF… as long as the text is “an image”, you can’t copy it. OCR (optical character recognition) solves this: it detects the letters in the image and turns them into reusable text.
What is OCR for?
OCR reads the text in an image or a scanned PDF and outputs plain text you can copy, paste and edit. Ideal for digitising paper documents or recovering the content of a screenshot.
Extract text, step by step
1. Add your image or PDF.
2. Choose the document language if needed.
3. Start recognition and get the extracted text.
Tips for a good result
Extraction quality depends on image sharpness: a well-framed, straight, legible document gives the best results. Blurry or heavily stylised text is harder to recognise.