OCR

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) turns the picture of text into actual, selectable characters. A scanned page or a photo of a document is, to a computer, just a grid of pixels: there is no text in it, only an image that happens to look like words. OCR analyses the shapes of letters and rebuilds the underlying string of characters.

The result is usually written back as an invisible text layer sitting exactly on top of the original image, so the page still looks like the scan but is now searchable, copyable and indexable. Modern engines handle multiple languages, columns and tables, and accuracy depends heavily on the source resolution: a clean 300 DPI scan recognises far better than a blurry phone snapshot. Tesseract, the open-source engine, is the one most browser-based tools build on.

Because OCR often runs over sensitive paperwork, invoices, contracts, ID documents, where it happens is a real privacy question. reader.me runs recognition with WebAssembly inside your browser, so the page image and the text it produces stay on your device and are never sent anywhere to be read by a server.