OCR Tools
Optical character recognition (OCR) turns pixels — a photo of a receipt, a scanned contract, a screenshot of a paragraph — into text you can copy, search and edit. Toolnova's OCR runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract, the same open-source recognition engine behind many commercial tools, downloaded on demand the first time you open an OCR tool. Image to Text handles single photos and screenshots directly. Scan PDF to Text does the same job for a scanned PDF, page by page, and is the tool to reach for when a PDF was produced by a physical scanner or a "photo saved as PDF" workflow rather than exported from a word processor — those PDFs contain an image of the text, not the text itself, so PDF to Text alone will return nothing useful on them.
OCR accuracy depends heavily on the source image: straight, well-lit, high-contrast photos of clean typed text recognize best. Handwriting, low light, skewed angles and low resolution all reduce accuracy, and no OCR engine — Toolnova's included — gets everything right on a difficult scan. Always proofread OCR output before relying on it for anything official.
How to scan documents with just your phone (no app required)
Frequently asked questions
Does OCR work on handwriting?
Only unreliably. Tesseract, like most OCR engines, is trained primarily on printed text; cursive or messy handwriting often produces garbled results. For handwritten notes, manual transcription is still more accurate.
Which languages does OCR support?
The default is English. Recognition quality for other languages depends on which language data the underlying engine loads — accented characters and non-Latin scripts are more error-prone than plain English text.
Why is OCR slower than the other tools?
Recognition happens page-by-page on your own device's CPU rather than a server, so a 20-page scanned PDF genuinely takes longer than a 1-page photo. Large or high-resolution files take proportionally longer.