Extracting Text From Scanned Documents Without Losing Formatting

The two-pass workflow

OCR engines work best on clean, high-contrast images. Most scans need a little prep.

1. Scan at 300 DPI in greyscale or black-and-white.
2. Straighten skewed pages with your scanner software or a free tool like ScanTailor.
3. Crop the margins to remove staples and shadows.
4. Upload to ImageToTextSA, choose your language, and extract.

Save formatting with DOCX

Plain TXT works for raw text. If you want bold, italics and headings to land closer to the original, download as DOCX and clean up in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.