OCR built on a vision-language model
PaddleOCR-VL, the model behind this page, was built for exactly one job: reading text out of images. Upload a photo of a document, a scan, a screenshot, a receipt, a whiteboard, or a book page, and it returns the text as editable characters you can copy anywhere. It is the reading counterpart to our free AI image captioning tool: captioning describes what an image shows, while this page transcribes exactly what is written in it.
Because the model understands documents rather than just matching character shapes, it keeps reading where classic OCR breaks down: curved book pages, photos taken at an angle, low contrast receipts, decorative fonts, and handwriting. It reads 109 languages and scripts, so a mixed-language document comes out right without any language setting.
What is OCR?
OCR, optical character recognition, is the technology that turns pictures of text into actual text. Classic OCR engines match letter shapes one at a time, which works on clean print and falls apart on anything messy. Modern vision-language OCR like the model behind this page reads the way a person does: it looks at the whole document, understands the layout, and transcribes what it sees. That is why photo to text, screenshot to text, and handwriting to text all work in the same tool, with no scanner required.
Tables, formulas, and charts
Plain text is the default, but the extraction mode select unlocks three specialist modes. Table mode reconstructs rows and columns as markup you can paste into a spreadsheet or document. Formula mode turns printed mathematics into LaTeX-style markup. Chart mode reads the data out of bar, line, and pie charts. Those modes return structured markup rather than prose, and copying preserves it exactly.
To check what hidden information an image carries beyond its visible text, pair this with the free image metadata viewer, which reads EXIF data, GPS location, and embedded AI prompts without uploading the file anywhere.
What to expect
Sharp, well-lit images transcribe nearly perfectly; accuracy degrades gracefully with blur and low light rather than collapsing. Handwriting comes back impressively well for legible writing and reasonably for messy notes; always proofread anything important. The tool accepts JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 4096px per side. An image stays on the GPU only for the seconds the extraction takes.