# Chinese image to text (OCR)

> Extract Chinese text from photos, screenshots and scanned PDFs in your browser, in Simplified and Traditional characters. Copy or save as .txt. Free, no upload.

URL: https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-chinese
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 Chinese text from images and scanned PDFs. Simplified is selected; switch to Chinese (Traditional) for Taiwan and Hong Kong text, or to a vertical model for top-to-bottom columns.

## How to use it

1. Check that the language is Chinese; 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:** Chinese, 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.

### Simplified or Traditional?

Choose the model that matches the image: Simplified for mainland China and Singapore, Traditional for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. The wrong one lowers accuracy sharply.

### Does it translate the text?

No, it only reads it. Paste the result into a translator if you need another language.

### Can I copy or download the text?

Yes. Copy the text in one click or download it as a .txt file. The text is editable in the box, so you can fix any misread characters first.

## Related tools

- [Image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text)
- [Japanese image to text (OCR)](https://tools.cuelark.com/image-to-text-japanese)
- [Word counter](https://tools.cuelark.com/word-counter)
- [PDF to PNG](https://tools.cuelark.com/pdf-to-png)