# Arabic image to text (OCR)

> Extract Arabic text from photos, screenshots and scanned PDFs in your browser, in right-to-left Arabic script. Copy or save as .txt. Free, no upload.

URL: https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-arabic
Publisher: Cuelark Team (https://cuelark.com)
Updated: 2026-11-10
Price: free, no sign-up
Privacy: runs in the browser; files are not uploaded

Extract Arabic text from images, screenshots and scanned PDFs, returned right to left as Unicode you can paste anywhere. Persian and Urdu have their own models in the list.

## How to use it

1. Check that the language is Arabic; tick Also read English if the text mixes in English words.
2. Drop the image or scanned PDF, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V. The first run downloads the language data.
3. Copy the text or save it as a .txt file. Check names and numbers against the original.

## Details

- **Engine:** Tesseract 5 LSTM via tesseract.js 7 (Apache-2.0), running in a Web Worker in this tab
- **Language:** Arabic, or any of 120+ Tesseract languages from the list. Mixed-language text: tick Also read English
- **Input:** JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, screenshots pasted with Ctrl+V, and scanned PDFs (up to 30 pages, rendered at 200 DPI)
- **Download:** The engine and the language data, a few megabytes each, fetched once from jsDelivr and cached by the browser
- **Output:** Plain text you can copy or save as .txt, with Tesseract's confidence score per image

## Questions

### Is my image uploaded?

No. Text recognition runs in this tab with Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly. The only downloads are the engine and the language data (from the jsDelivr CDN, cached after the first time); your image is never part of any request.

### Does it handle right-to-left text?

Yes. The text box switches to right-to-left for Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew, and the copied text keeps the correct order.

### Are diacritics (tashkeel) kept?

Partly. Small vowel marks are often dropped or misread, especially in small print. Plain unvowelled text is read best.

### Can it read Urdu Nastaliq?

Choose Urdu. Nastaliq calligraphy is harder for OCR than Naskh, so expect more errors with ornate fonts.

## Related tools

- [Image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text)
- [Hindi image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-hindi)
- [Word counter](https://tools.cuelark.com/word-counter)
- [PDF to JPG](https://tools.cuelark.com/pdf-to-jpg)