OCR Text Extractor

Tesseract.js (the engine this tool uses) achieves about 90–95% character accuracy on clean printed text — comparable to the desktop Tesseract engine. Accuracy drops for: low-contrast images, photos taken at an angle, blurred or motion-affected images, fancy fonts, decorative backgrounds, and handwriting (typically 50–70%). For mission-critical OCR (legal documents, accounting, medical), use a commercial cloud service like Google Cloud Vision or AWS Textract.

On first run, the browser downloads the Tesseract WebAssembly engine (~2 MB) plus the language model for the language you're recognizing (~3–10 MB per language). After the first run these are cached, and subsequent runs start instantly. Multi-language OCR requires multiple language models.

Tesseract supports 100+ languages including all major European languages, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, and many more. The default is English. Each language model is a separate download. Mixed-language documents work but accuracy may suffer; specifying multiple languages helps.

Tesseract has limited handwriting support. Block letters and very neat cursive sometimes work; typical messy handwriting often produces gibberish. For handwriting OCR, modern AI-based tools (Google's, Microsoft's, or specialized HTR engines like Transkribus) are dramatically better — at the cost of being cloud-only.

Yes, when possible. OCR works best on upright, high-contrast text. Use Image Rotate, Image Levels, or Auto-Contrast tools to clean up an image before OCR. The Tesseract engine will attempt automatic deskewing but works far better with a clean input.

No. OCR runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your images are never sent to a server. You can safely OCR sensitive documents (financial, medical, legal) without exposing them. The trade-off: it's slower than cloud OCR services and slightly less accurate, but the privacy guarantee is absolute.