What OCR online actually does
OCR, optical character recognition, is the step that turns a picture of text into real text. A scanner or phone camera only captures pixels; to a computer, a scanned contract is no different from a photo of a cat. OCR finds the letters in those pixels and writes them out as characters you can select, edit, search and paste.
Older OCR software matched letter shapes against templates and struggled with anything that wasn't a clean, straight scan. PicX uses a vision AI model instead, which reads the page more like a person: it follows columns, keeps line breaks and copes with photos taken at a slight angle.
How to scan a document for the best OCR result
You don't need a document scanner app, but a few habits make a big difference to accuracy.
- Lay the page flat and shoot from straight above, so lines aren't curved or skewed.
- Use even daylight or room light. Avoid the phone flash, which causes a glare patch that hides words.
- Fill the frame with the page and crop out the table or background.
- One page per image. For a multi-page document, run each page in turn and paste the text together.
- Rotate sideways scans upright first with the rotate image tool.
OCR online vs image to text
Both tools read text from pictures. This OCR tool is set up for documents: scans, letters, receipts and printed pages you want to turn into editable text. If you're grabbing a quote from a screenshot, a meme or a slide, the image to text tool is the quicker fit. Need the whole document as a PDF rather than text? Use screenshot to PDF or image to PDF instead.
