Why turn a picture into a Word document
A photo of a printed page, a notice, a letter or a book page contains text that you cannot edit or copy. Typing it again takes time and invites mistakes. Text recognition (OCR) reads the letters in the picture and gives you editable text in a Word document.
What happens when you convert
You choose the language of the text — English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Spanish, French, German or Arabic. The language data is downloaded once into your browser, the picture is read on your device, and the recognised text is placed into a .docx file. The original picture is added at the end of the document, so you can compare and correct the text easily.
Which pictures give the best results
Clear printed text in good, even light works best. Hold the camera straight above the page so lines are level, fill the frame with the text, and avoid shadows and glare. Handwriting, decorative fonts, very small print and curved book pages near the spine are often recognised poorly.
Common problems and how to fix them
Words are wrong or mixed: check that the right language was selected and take a sharper photo. Lines come out in a strange order: the page had columns or tables; crop each column with Crop Image and convert them separately. Many letters are missing: increase contrast first with Adjust Image Contrast or Grayscale Image.
Good habits
Always proofread names, numbers and dates against the picture, keep the original photo, and for multi-page scanned PDFs use OCR PDF instead.