Skip to content
All guides
OCR · How-toProcessed in your browser

How to use Image to Text

By Docverix EditorialLast reviewed

Extract editable text from images and scanned PDFs entirely in the browser. The OCR engine is Tesseract.js — open source, runs as a Web Worker on your machine, supports 24 languages across Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Indic, and RTL scripts, and never uploads your file to a server. Recognised words come back with a confidence score so you can see at a glance which parts need a manual sanity-check.

Good for

  • Pulling text out of a scanned contract, receipt, or printed form
  • Searching screenshots and photo notes for a phrase you half-remember
  • Copying a recipe / paragraph / quote off a phone snap of a printed page
  • Pre-processing a scanned PDF before pasting the text into Word
  • Batch-OCR'ing whiteboard photos after a meeting

Not good for

  • Handwriting — Tesseract is trained on printed text; cursive scans return mush
  • Tables (the output is line-by-line; column structure collapses)
  • Mixed-script docs (e.g., English + Arabic paragraphs in the same image) — pick the dominant language and accept some loss
  • Very low-resolution images below ~150 DPI — accuracy drops sharply
  • Heavily stylised fonts (logos, decorative type, distressed lettering)

Walkthrough

Step by step

  1. 01

    Drop the image or PDF

    Tools menu → Image to Text. Accepts PNG, JPG, TIFF, and PDF up to 25 MB. Multi-page PDFs get OCR'd page-by-page and the text concatenates in reading order.

  2. 02

    Pick the language

    24 languages across Latin/European, Cyrillic, CJK, Indic, and right-to-left scripts. Pick the one that matches your document — the matching language pack lazy-loads on first use (~5–15 MB, cached afterwards).

  3. 03

    Toggle AI assist (optional)

    For hard scans (faded faxes, handwriting, low-light photos) flip the AI toggle. The page routes to a server-side vision model with a small daily quota per IP — quota lifts on the Platform tier.

  4. 04

    Start recognition

    Click Extract Text. The progress bar reports per-page as Tesseract works. A clean 5-page scan typically completes in 15-30 seconds on a modern laptop; older devices take ~2× as long.

  5. 05

    Read the confidence highlights

    Every recognised word is scored 0-100. ≥90% renders normal, 70-89% amber, below 70% red with a dotted underline. Skim the reds first — that's where errors hide.

  6. 06

    Copy or download

    Click Copy to grab the whole text to clipboard, or Download for a .txt file. The original file is never modified or stored on a server.

Tips

  • Crank source-image DPI to 300+ before scanning — recognition jumps from ~80% to ~97% on clean prints.
  • Crop tightly around the text before uploading; busy borders and whitespace confuse the segmentation step.
  • Even a 5° page skew costs ~10% accuracy. The pre-process pass deskews automatically but only within a few degrees — re-scan straight if it's obviously rotated.
  • Multi-page PDFs: OCR is CPU-bound, so the tab needs to stay open. Plug into power on a laptop if it's a 50+ page doc.
  • For languages not in the dropdown (Thai, Greek, more Indic scripts), the AI toggle uses a model that covers ~100 languages — quota-gated.

Frequently asked

Ready to use Image to Text?

Open Image to Text

Docverix Platform

Need workflow + audit on every doc your team handles?

Docverix Platform turns these tools into a routed, audited pipeline — validator → supervisor → approver, with a complete audit trail.