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Punjabi OCR — Extract Gurmukhi Text from Scans and Images

Upload a scanned Punjabi PDF or an image of a Gurmukhi page and get editable Unicode Punjabi back. Free, ad-free, no sign-up.

ਪੰਜਾਬੀ · Accepts PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF up to 25 MB, a PDF up to 10 pages · Files deleted within 4 hours

Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Online & Free

Convert Scanned Documents and Images into Text

Drop PDF or image here. PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF supported.

Up to 25 MB. A PDF can have up to 10 pages; split a longer one first and send the parts one at a time.

How to recognize text from image?

1

Upload your file

Click "Choose Files" or drag and drop your scanned PDF or image onto the upload area.

2

Select language

Choose the language of the text in your document from the dropdown for best OCR accuracy.

3

Download text

Click "Recognize" and download the extracted text file once processing is complete.

Unicode output

NFC-normalised text that pastes into any editor and stays searchable.

No ads, no sign-up

Free to use. Uploads removed within 4 hours.

Measured, not claimed

100% character accuracy on our published test corpus.

Legacy Punjabi fonts and PageMaker

Older Punjabi documents were often typed in a legacy font, which stores the keys pressed rather than Punjabi letters, so copied text comes out as Latin letters. IndicPDF reads Punjabi typed in Asees. A PDF set in one of them is read from its font, here or in the Legacy Font tool, rather than by OCR.

For PageMaker, Word to PageMaker writes a Unicode Punjabi Word file back in Asees, ready to place in PageMaker 7.

Measured accuracy

On our ground-truth corpus the pipeline read 100% of the characters of its one Punjabi test page correctly, 1,206 characters of prose. One clean digital page is far too small a sample to call that a rate: it says the common letters, tippi, bindi and addak are read well when the print is clean, and nothing about a worn or photographed page.

Letters on their own

Gurmukhi recognition leans on the word around each letter. We drew 41 Gurmukhi letters one at a time in a clean Unicode font and read them back: 26 came back right. Of 15 consonants with a vowel sign, 10 did, and every subjoined letter under a consonant was misread. Real words in the same font came back far better, 34 of 40. So a list of letters, a table of single characters or a word broken across a line reads much worse than running text.

Lines read in the wrong alphabet

A page is read with the Punjabi and English models together, so an English phrase in it comes back in English. On our test page that sometimes went the other way: whole Gurmukhi lines came back as Latin letters, such as HH act Uet. Latin words on a line that is not mostly English words are now read again with the Punjabi model alone, which repairs those lines, while English lines are left exactly as they were read. Handwriting is not supported; this reads printed Punjabi.

Frequently asked questions

ਸਕੈਨ ਕੀਤੀ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ PDF ਵਿੱਚੋਂ ਟੈਕਸਟ ਕਿਵੇਂ ਕੱਢੀਏ?

ਉੱਪਰ PDF ਅੱਪਲੋਡ ਕਰੋ। ਪੰਨੇ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਟੈਕਸਟ ਵਜੋਂ ਪਛਾਣੇ ਜਾਂਦੇ ਹਨ ਅਤੇ ਯੂਨੀਕੋਡ ਵਿੱਚ ਵਾਪਸ ਮਿਲਦੇ ਹਨ, ਜਿਸ ਨੂੰ ਤੁਸੀਂ ਕਾਪੀ ਅਤੇ ਸੰਪਾਦਿਤ ਕਰ ਸਕਦੇ ਹੋ।

Does it read Shahmukhi?

No. This reads Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script. Shahmukhi is written in the Perso-Arabic script, which the tool does not read.

Will a page of Punjabi and English come back with both?

Yes. Both are read together, and a line that is mostly English words is kept as it was read.

What file types can I use for Punjabi OCR?

PDF, JPG, PNG and TIFF, up to 25 MB per file. Scanned PDFs are rasterised page by page before recognition, so a PDF with no text layer works the same as a photograph.

How many pages can I send at once?

The OCR tool reads a PDF of up to 10 pages; a longer one is refused at upload, so split it with Split PDF and send the parts. PDF to Word reads up to 300 pages. A scanned page takes about 23 seconds to read, so a PDF with more than about 23 scanned pages is refused until it is split into parts.

What counts as a page?

One page of your file as it is stored, which is one side of a sheet. A book scanned two pages to a sheet counts one page for each sheet. A JPG or PNG is one page, and a TIFF counts every page it holds. All of them count towards the OCR tool's 10 pages and PDF to Word's 300, blank pages included. Only pages read by OCR count towards PDF to Word's limit of about 23 scanned pages a job: an empty page is not read, but a blank page in a scan is a picture of paper and is read like any other.

Is the output real Unicode text?

Yes. Output is standard Unicode, normalised to NFC, so it copies into Word, Google Docs or any editor and stays searchable. It is not an image of text and not a legacy font encoding.

Do I need an account?

No. The tool is free and requires no sign-up, no email and no payment. There are no advertisements on any page.

What happens to my files?

Uploads and results are stored encrypted and removed by a cleanup that runs every 15 minutes, so nothing is kept longer than 4 hours after upload. Files are processed to produce your result and are not used for anything else.

Should I use Auto Detect or pick the language myself?

Pick the language when you know it. Auto detection reads the script from the page and then verifies its guess, but a page with only a few lines, heavy noise, or mixed English gives it less to work with. Manual selection removes that uncertainty entirely.

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