Urdu OCR

How Urdu OCR works

Drop a photo of a printed Urdu page, a screenshot or a scanned document, and the text is recognised and saved as Unicode Urdu that you can paste into Word, Google Docs, a search box or a translator. The text is stored right to left in logical order, as every modern app expects. Many Urdu books and newspapers were set in InPage, whose files often cannot be copied as Unicode; reading a picture of the page here is a way around that.

Urdu uses the Arabic script with extra letters for its own sounds, such as ٹ, ڈ, ڑ, ں and ے, and Tesseract's Urdu model is trained to output them. The difficulty is the style of writing. Most Urdu books and newspapers are set in Nastaliq, a flowing style in which each word slopes down from right to left and letters stack on top of one another. Naskh-style type, whose letters sit on a flat line and which is common on websites, signs and forms, is much easier for OCR.

On Nastaliq pages, expect errors where letters overlap and in small print, and check the dots that separate letters such as ب, پ, ت and ٹ. Short vowel marks (aerab) are often dropped. Numbers may be printed in Urdu digits (۰ to ۹) or as 0 to 9, and are read as printed.

The Urdu model, about 1.0 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 the Urdu alphabet, 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, stored in logical order so it displays right to left. For an editable Word document instead, use Image to Word and choose Urdu.

Urdu OCR options explained

When to use it

Use Urdu OCR to copy text from a screenshot or scanned letter, to get the text of a notice, form or certificate into a document, to search photographed pages of a book, or to paste Urdu from an image into a translator.

For Nastaliq pages, use the largest, sharpest image you can: a close photo of half a page reads better than a distant photo of the whole page.

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.

Urdu OCR troubleshooting

Many errors on a book or newspaper page

It is probably set in Nastaliq, which is harder to read than Naskh. Use a closer, sharper photo and proofread the result.

Letters with dots are confused

The dots were lost to blur or compression. Use a sharper image at full size.

The words run the wrong way in my editor

Set the paragraph direction to right to left; the text itself is stored correctly.

How to use Urdu 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.