Optical Character Recognition, or OCR for short, works by strategically scanning an image pixel by pixel for features that resemble character sets it was trained on. Under the hood, we use Tesseract, an open source optical character recognition algorithm developed by Google, for extracting text from images. For PDF files, we use the Mozilla PDF parsing library which is excellent at parsing characters in a PDF in microseconds. Both softwares are cutting edge, and scan images block by block for text-like features.
Most commonly, image to text is used to save time in converting a long image or long PDFs, such as books, into text. You can then easily edit the text afterward using an online text editor or an offline application like Microsoft Word. You can recognize photos, cards, and text documents to quickly extract the text in an automated way.
Do not spend hours retyping and correcting typographical errors. Save time with an efficient optical character recognition application. This is a quick and easy alternative to a scanner or a digital camera.
The software runs right in your browser or on our services, quickly and efficiently. We do not save your information, share your data, or install any software. Online PDF to text conversion requires no installation to extract text from PDF files.
Optical Character Recognition has been used in a variety of places for use in everyday life. License plate scanners use it to record tolls, keep records, and for tickets. Phones use optical character recognition to help characterize some images for grouping. Automobiles use optical character recognition to recognize informative signs on the road and provide other insights to drivers. Some devices even use optical character recognition paired with translation to help translate every day signs and text on your glasses.
The higher the quality, the more likely it is that your PDF or text will be read successfully.
The longer the text, the more difficult it is for the converter to recognize text. It is much better to use smaller amounts of text for the fastest results.
Image to text recognition software is not perfect. Make sure to double-check the text afterward and make sure it is readable.
Our image to text software runs on your computer. The better computer you have available, the faster you will receive results.
If you do not have good handwriting, then the success rate might be lower. Lines and boxes can confuse the application because the software might accidentally recognize them as text.
For best results, make sure your image the least amount of clutter possible. Clutter might be weird shapes, different colors, different symbols, or other things that might confuse the software.
In some cases, you may want to extract text from image files. The file format of your image is not important, you can easily convert from JPG, PNG, TIF, and other formats. In order to focus on presentations, lectures or meetings, it is usually easier to just take a quick photo of the slideshow or presentation, and focus on listening to the speaker. Using object character recognition, or image to text, makes this much easier. You also can scan articles, documents, receipts, invoices, and any paperwork. Those document types are often easily saved in PDF format, perfect for PDF to text. Another easily solution is to take a screenshot of a page, typically a PNG or JPG image, and use that screenshot to get text from image.
We believe that anyone should be able to use technological necessities. Our way of making that happen is by building simple applications which can be used in a variety of languages. Although our main focus is language based applications, we are in the process of building tools for everyday use cases. Have an idea for an application that might be useful in many other languages other than english? Feel free to reach out to us, we would love to hear from you!
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