Malayalam OCR

How Malayalam OCR works

Drop a photo of a Malayalam newspaper, a scanned book page, a certificate or a screenshot, and the text is recognised and saved as Unicode Malayalam for Word, Google Docs, WhatsApp or a translator. The output is standard Unicode, not the ML-TT or other legacy font encodings of older desktop publishing, so it works in every app.

Malayalam has one of the largest sets of conjunct letters of any Indian script. In the traditional script, still used in many books and by fonts such as Rachana, clusters like ക്ക, ന്ന and ങ്ങ are drawn as single fused shapes; the reformed script adopted for printing in 1971 writes more of them with a visible virama, the chandrakkala (്), and separate vowel signs. Malayalam also has chillu letters, ൽ, ൻ, ർ, ൾ and ൺ, consonants with no vowel written in a special final form. Tesseract's model reads whole lines with a neural network trained on printed Malayalam.

Fused conjuncts of the traditional script, particularly rare ones in old books, and the chandrakkala in small print are the most common errors. Chillu letters can be stored in Unicode in two ways that look identical, as one character or as the consonant with a chandrakkala, so if you search the text later and miss a word, try the other form.

The Malayalam model, about 2.8 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 Malayalam 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 Malayalam.

Malayalam OCR options explained

When to use it

Use Malayalam OCR to copy text from a scanned book, magazine or newspaper, to type up a photographed certificate, notice or letter, to search old family documents, or to paste Malayalam from an image into a translator.

Conjuncts need detail: photograph closely enough that the chandrakkala and the joins inside fused letters are sharp 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.

Malayalam OCR troubleshooting

Conjunct letters come out wrong

Rare fused letters in old books are the hardest part. Use a sharper image and correct the rest by hand.

Searching the text misses some words

Chillu letters can be stored in two ways that look the same. Search for both forms.

The text is in English letters

Choose Malayalam in the language menu and convert again.

How to use Malayalam 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.