Amharic OCR: Image to Text

Getting a clean read

1. 1.

   Use a high-resolution scan or photo — 300 DPI or better.

2. 2.

   Even lighting and strong contrast beat a higher megapixel count.

3. 3.

   Keep lines of text horizontal; straighten a skewed page first.

4. 4.

   Crop to the text itself, leaving out margins and background.

፨Recognition is never perfect on handwriting, low contrast or unusual typefaces. Read the result against the original before relying on it.

Common questions

What is Amharic OCR?

OCR, optical character recognition, reads the letters in a picture and turns them into real text you can edit, search and copy. This one reads ፊደል and English, even mixed in the same document.

Which files can I use?

Photos and screenshots (JPG, PNG and other image formats) and PDFs. For a PDF every page is read, and you can copy or download each page on its own, or all of the text together as a .txt file.

Are my documents uploaded anywhere?

No. Recognition runs inside your browser with Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine. The first time, your browser downloads Tesseract's Amharic language data, so the first read is slower; your image or PDF itself never leaves your device.

How accurate is it?

Clean printed text, like a book page, a typed letter or a screenshot, usually comes out well. Blurry photos, very small print and decorative fonts come out worse. Letters that differ only by a small vowel mark, such as ለ and ሉ, are easy to confuse, so read the result against the original.

Can it read handwriting?

Not reliably. It is built for printed text. Neat, well-spaced handwriting sometimes partly works, but expect to retype a lot of it.

What can I do with the text afterwards?

Copy it anywhere, or keep going here: fix mistakes with the Amharic keyboard, put it into English with the translator, or hear it read aloud with text to speech.