How to Copy Text from an Image or Scanned PDF – Free OCR Compared, Including Japanese

PDFs made from Word or Excel already contain text. Open the PDF and try to select some text: if you can, you don’t need OCR. PDF to Word gets the text out faster and more accurately.

If you can’t select the text (a scanned PDF or one made from photos), the text is an image and needs OCR.

The free Adobe Acrobat Reader has no OCR; you need paid Acrobat Pro.

On iPhone, open a photo in Photos and press and hold the text to select and copy it. The Live Text button (lines inside a frame) at the bottom right makes all the text in the photo selectable. You can also point the camera at text and tap the same button.

On a Mac, you can drag to select and copy text in images opened in Preview or Photos. Recent versions of iOS and macOS read Japanese too.

Open Google Lens and point the camera at the text, or open a photo in Google Photos, tap Lens and choose Text. Select the text and tap Copy to paste it elsewhere. Lens can also translate the text in place. Images are processed by Google’s services.

In Windows 11, take a snip with the Snipping Tool and a Text Actions button appears in the toolbar. Tap it to make the text selectable, then Copy all text. It works for whatever you can show on screen.

Upload a PDF or image to Google Drive, right-click it and choose Open with → Google Docs. A document with the recognized text is created.

The file is uploaded to Google Drive and the original layout is lost. There are also limits on file size and pages, so long PDFs may not be read in full.

Our OCR tool reads multi-page scanned PDFs and several images at once, in your browser. Recognition runs on your own device and your files are never uploaded.

1. On the OCR page, select a PDF or images
2. Choose the language: Japanese (horizontal or vertical) or English
3. Tap the button to start reading (the first time takes a little longer)
4. Check and correct the text, then copy it or save it as text or Word. You can also create a searchable PDF that looks like the original

For letters from the city office, school notices or contracts in Japanese, read the text with OCR, then paste it into Google Translate or DeepL. Choose “Japanese (vertical)” for documents written top to bottom. Always check numbers, dates and names against the original: OCR can confuse similar characters such as 力 (power) and カ (katakana ka).

• Photograph the document straight on in good light, avoiding shadows, glare and blur
• If the text is small, fill the frame with the part you need
• Fix sideways or tilted pages first
• Choose the vertical setting for vertical Japanese
• Compare numbers, names and look-alike characters with the original

Handwriting and decorative fonts are harder to read. For large volumes of handwritten forms, consider a paid AI OCR service.