Image to Text (OCR)

How it works

DocuZero's OCR tool reads the text embedded in a picture — a scanned page, a photo of a whiteboard, a screenshot of an article — and turns it into text you can copy, search or edit. The recognition engine (Tesseract) runs as WebAssembly directly inside your browser tab, so the image itself is never sent anywhere.

How to extract text from an image

Drop your image into the box above — either drag it in or click to browse; JPG, PNG and WEBP are all accepted. Choose the language the text is written in from the dropdown, then press Extract text. The first run loads the OCR engine (the progress bar shows "Loading OCR engine…"); recognition then takes over and reports its percentage while it works. When it finishes, the text appears in a read-only box with two actions: Copy puts it on your clipboard, and Download .txt saves it as a plain-text file named ocr-export.txt.

How to get accurate results

OCR quality depends mostly on the image, not the engine. A few habits make a big difference:

Resolution. Aim for text at least 20–30 pixels tall. If you can't comfortably read the letters when zoomed in, neither can the OCR engine.

Straighten and crop. Skewed photos force the engine to guess where lines start and end. Crop to the text area and straighten the page before running recognition.

Contrast. Dark text on a light background works best. Shadows across a photographed page are the most common cause of dropped words.

Printed beats handwritten. The engine is trained on printed type; neat block capitals work, cursive handwriting largely doesn't.

A concrete example

Say you led a workshop and photographed the flipchart holding the action plan as the room emptied. Open that photo here, pick English (or English + French if the flipchart mixes both), press Extract text, and the seven action points come back as clean text in a few seconds — ready to paste into your team's task tracker. The same move works on a signed contract you need to quote from, an address block trapped in a screenshot, or a photographed menu you want to keep as searchable text.

What to expect

The tool takes a single image (image/* — JPG, PNG, WEBP) and returns plain text; it does not try to rebuild the layout. It reads line by line, so paragraphs and line breaks come out approximated, and tables or columns arrive flattened, ready to be reordered by hand.

Four language options are available: English, French, both combined, or Arabic. There is no enforced size limit, but very large or high-resolution images take longer because recognition runs on your device's processor. The first recognition is slower while the engine loads; afterwards it stays in memory and later images process faster. Whatever you feed it, the image and the text never leave your browser.

Common problems and fixes

Blurry or low-resolution image and words look missed? Use the sharpest version you have — text needs to be at least 20–30 pixels tall for the engine to stand a chance. Accented characters come out wrong? The engine applies a language model, so pick the right one: English, French, or English + French when the source mixes both. Lines look broken or merged on a tilted photo? Straighten the page and crop to the text area before running recognition. Recognition crawls on a large image? Crop to the text zone, and remember the very first run is slower because the engine is loading.

Frequently asked questions