How Image to Word works
Add one or more images of text, such as a photographed letter, a scanned page or a screenshot, and the words in them are recognised and written into a Word document you can edit, restyle and spell-check. Several images go into one DOCX in the order you added them, which suits the pages of a document photographed one by one.
Recognition is done by Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine, running inside this tab. Choose the language of the text first: each of the 64 languages has its own trained model, and only the one you pick is downloaded, once, and then cached. For text that mixes another language with English words, tick Also read English words and both models read the image together. The engine itself is about 4 MB. Your images are read on your own device and never sent anywhere.
The document is built in your browser too. Each paragraph Tesseract finds becomes a Word paragraph, and you choose what happens to the lines inside it: keep the line breaks exactly where they fall in the image, which suits poems, addresses and lists, or join them into flowing paragraphs, which suits the text of books and letters and puts back words that were split with a hyphen at the end of a line. Each image can start on a new page or follow straight on.
The file is a standard DOCX that opens in Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs and Apple Pages. The text is set in Calibri at 11 points on A4 or Letter pages and tagged with the language you chose, so Word checks the spelling in that language. Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew and Yiddish paragraphs are set right to left.
What OCR cannot give you is the look of the original page. Columns, tables, fonts, bold and italic, and pictures are not reproduced: you get the words, in reading order, ready to edit. When the look of the page matters more than editing it, Image to PDF keeps each image exactly as it is.
Image to Word options explained
| Text language | 64 languages; the model for the one you choose downloads once. |
|---|---|
| Also read English words | Adds the English model, for text that mixes English into another language. Slower. |
| Line breaks | Kept as in the image, or joined within each paragraph. |
| Each image | Starts a new page, or follows straight after the previous one. |
| Page size | A4 or US Letter, with margins of one inch (2.54 cm). |
| Output | One DOCX for all the images, named after the image when there is only one. |
When to use it
Use it to turn a printed letter or contract into a document you can edit, to get a scanned book chapter into Word for quoting, to type up photographed lecture notes or handouts, to reuse the text of a flyer or poster, or to make a document from screenshots of a web page or PDF you cannot copy from.
Photograph each page flat, straight on and in good light, and crop away the desk around it. For a long document, add the pages in order and choose Join into paragraphs, then proofread against the originals.
About the OCR engine
Text recognition uses Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine first developed at HP, then for many years at Google, and now maintained by its open-source community. Its current generation reads whole lines of text with a neural network (an LSTM) rather than matching letters one at a time, which is what lets it handle joined scripts such as Arabic and Devanagari. Tesseract.js compiles it to WebAssembly so it runs in this tab. Each language has its own trained model, downloaded from the jsDelivr CDN only when that language is chosen and then cached, so reading English never downloads Hindi, and the other way round. The models used here are the integer versions of Tesseract's most accurate models, which keep nearly all of their accuracy at a fraction of the size. Tesseract is built for printed text: it reads books, letters, forms, signs and screenshots well, handwriting poorly, and it keeps the words of a page in reading order but not its layout.
Image to Word troubleshooting
Some words are wrong
OCR is never perfect. Check the language setting, use sharper and larger images, and proofread with Word's spell-checker, which the document is set up for.
The text comes out in one long column
Tesseract reads pages with several columns in reading order but does not rebuild the columns. Crop each column into its own image if you need them apart.
"No text was recognised"
The images may be too small, blurred or in another language. Choose the right language and try a sharper photo.
How to use Image to Word, step by step
- Press "Choose images" or drag files onto the box.
- Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
- Press "Create Word file". The work happens on your device.
- Save the result with its download button.
Is it safe to do this online?
With most online tools, "online" means your file is uploaded to a company's server, processed there and kept for a while before it is deleted. Here it is not. The page downloads the tool's code to your browser, and your file is read and processed inside the tab on your own device. It is never sent to TapToConvert or anyone else.
You can check this yourself: once the page and its engine have loaded, turn off Wi-Fi and the tool still works. That also means there is no queue, no daily limit and no file size cap set by a server; the only limit is the memory your browser gives a single tab.
Image to Word FAQ
Can I edit the Word file?
Yes. It is ordinary text in a standard DOCX, so you can edit, restyle and spell-check it in any word processor.
Does it keep the layout, tables and pictures?
No. You get the text in reading order, with paragraphs and, if you choose, the original line breaks. Tables and columns become plain lines.
Can I put several images into one document?
Yes. Add them in order; each one can start on a new page.
Does it work with handwriting?
Poorly. Tesseract is trained on printed text; neat block capitals sometimes work.
Is it free?
Yes. No sign-up, no watermark and no limit on use. TapToConvert is supported by advertising.
Are my files uploaded?
No. Everything happens inside your browser tab, on your own device.