Gujarati OCR

How Gujarati OCR works

Drop a photo of a Gujarati newspaper, a scanned document, a book page or a screenshot, and the text is recognised and saved as Unicode Gujarati for Word, Google Docs, WhatsApp or a translator. The output is standard Unicode, not a legacy font encoding such as Terafont or LMG, so it displays correctly everywhere.

Gujarati comes from the same family as Devanagari but dropped the headline, so words sit on the line without the bar that joins Hindi letters, and many letters are drawn with rounder, simpler strokes. Vowel signs, the anusvara and conjuncts such as ક્ષ and જ્ઞ work much as they do in Hindi. Tesseract's Gujarati model reads whole lines with a neural network trained on printed Gujarati, so it does not rely on a headline to separate the letters.

The most common errors are in the small marks: anusvara dots, the chandrabindu (ઁ), and the short and long vowel signs in small print. Gujarati digits (૦ to ૯) are read as Gujarati digits. A heading set in a decorative or very heavy font needs more checking than body text.

The Gujarati model, about 1.2 MB, downloads from the jsDelivr CDN the first time you press the button and is cached, along with the OCR engine of about 4 MB, so later images start straight away. It is trained on Gujarati script, so if the text mixes in English words, tick Also read English words and the English model reads alongside it, a little more slowly. The image itself is read inside this tab and never uploaded. The result is a UTF-8 text file named after the image. For an editable Word document instead, use Image to Word and choose Gujarati.

Gujarati OCR options explained

When to use it

Use Gujarati OCR to copy text from a scanned book, magazine or newspaper, to type up a photographed land record, invoice or notice, to search old family papers, or to paste Gujarati from an image into a translator.

Photograph the page in daylight and straight on, and crop to the text. Keep the image large enough that anusvara dots are clearly visible when you zoom in.

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.

Gujarati OCR troubleshooting

Dots and small signs are missing

Use a sharper, larger image; the small marks disappear first.

The text comes out in English letters

Choose Gujarati in the language menu and convert again.

A Terafont PDF copies as nonsense

Legacy-font PDFs do not copy as Unicode. Convert the page to an image and read it here.

How to use Gujarati OCR, step by step

1. Press "Choose images" or drag files onto the box.
2. Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
3. Press "Extract text". The work happens on your device.
4. 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.