French OCR: image to text
French OCR for photos, scans and screenshots: get the text with its accents, cedillas and « guillemets » intact, ready to copy, edit or save to Word.
OCR that keeps French accents
An OCR tool tuned for English reads é as e, drops the cedilla from ç and turns « » into stray symbols, so every line needs fixing by hand. Here French is selected, so é è ê à ù ç œ and French punctuation come through, and the text keeps its paragraphs and columns. It suits school worksheets, letters from the administration, contracts and book pages.
What reads well
- Printed French text from letters, forms, books, worksheets and articles.
- Accented capitals (É, À, Ç) and ligatures such as œ and æ.
- Pages with two columns or tables: the text comes out in reading order, with tab gaps between columns.
- Not handwriting: cursive and handwritten notes are not read reliably.
For clean French text
- 1Shoot the page flat and evenly lit: accents are tiny and are the first thing a blurry photo loses.
- 2If the document also has English or Arabic passages, select that language too (up to three).
- 3For a long scanned document, use French OCR for PDF instead to make the whole file searchable.
Questions about French OCR: image to text
How do I extract French text from an image?+
Add the image or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. French is already selected, so click Extract text, then copy it or download a TXT or Word file.
Are accents and ç kept?+
Yes. French characters such as é, è, ê, à, ù, ç and œ are read as such, and French quotation marks are kept.
Can it read handwriting?+
Not reliably. It is made for printed text: documents, books, screenshots and signs.
Can I get a Word document?+
Yes. Download Word (.docx) gives an editable document with the recognized paragraphs.
Is my image uploaded?+
No. Recognition runs in your browser and your images never leave your device.