Everyday AI

How do I extract text from an image or a scanned PDF?

Your phone and computer already read text from images, free. On an iPhone, Live Text in the Camera and Photos lets you select, copy or translate text, and on a Mac, Preview does the same when you hold the pointer over text in a photo. On Android or any browser, Google Lens copies or translates text from a picture. On Windows, Microsoft's free PowerToys Text Extractor copies text from anywhere on the screen, images and videos included. For a scanned PDF, upload it to Google Drive and choose Open with Google Docs: it reads Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and many more, for files of 2 MB or less, though tables and columns rarely survive. To turn a scan into a searchable PDF, Adobe's free online OCR does it (sign in to download), and OCRmyPDF does the same offline for anyone comfortable with a command line. Rule: Live Text or Lens for a few lines, Google Docs for a page in an Indian language, a searchable PDF for a whole document.

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