Hindi OCR reads Devanagari script in screenshots, photos and scans: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Konkani, Bhojpuri and other languages written in Devanagari, along with English words and numbers in the same text. Everything runs in your browser, so the image stays on your device.
What people copy
| From | Why |
|---|---|
| A government form or notice | Copy details without retyping |
| A WhatsApp forward | Quote or translate it |
| A textbook page | Turn a passage into notes |
| A shop sign or poster | Paste the text into a translator |
What makes Devanagari harder to read
Devanagari letters hang from a headline (the shirorekha) and are changed by vowel signs (matras) above, below and beside them. Half letters join into conjuncts such as क्ष, त्र and ज्ञ, and small marks like the nukta, anusvara and chandrabindu change a word’s meaning. Blur and low resolution wipe out these small details first.
Print, screen and handwriting
| Source | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Screenshots of apps, websites, PDFs | Very good |
| Clean printed books, newspapers, forms | Good |
| Phone photos of documents | Good if sharp, flat and evenly lit |
| Old, faded or photocopied pages | Fair; check matras and conjuncts |
| Handwriting | Unreliable |
Tips for Devanagari scans
- Fill the frame with the text. Text is found on a reduced copy of the image, so tiny lines on a full-page photo can be missed. Crop to the paragraph you need.
- Shoot straight on in daylight, without shadows across the page. Matras sitting below the line suffer most from blur.
- Fix the result in the box. You can edit the text before copying; check names, numbers and words with nukta or chandrabindu.
The Kruti Dev problem
Text copied from many older Hindi PDFs and Word files comes out as nonsense like “vkidk” because the document uses a legacy font rather than Unicode. Recognising the text from an image of the page gives real Unicode Devanagari that works in Google Translate, Word, email and search. Take a screenshot of the page, or use PDF to Text with Hindi selected.