About us
Handwriting To Text (penciltotext.com) is a free online tool that turns photos and scans of handwriting into clean, editable text. We built it because a lot of important writing still starts on paper, in notebooks, on whiteboards and in letters, and retyping it by hand is slow and full of small mistakes.
What we believe
- Free to use, with no sign-up. You shouldn't need an account to get your own notes back. AI scan gives everyone 10 free pages a day, and Fast OCR is unlimited.
- Private by default. We don't keep your pages or the text we read from them. Your recent results stay in your own browser, and Fast OCR never uploads anything at all.
- Results you can check. AI is good at reading handwriting, but not perfect. Every line of the result is linked to the spot on your page it came from, and words we're unsure about are underlined, so you can check a page in seconds instead of trusting it blindly.
- Your notes, in your tools. Text is only useful once it's where you work, so you can copy it, or download it as Word, PDF, TXT, Markdown, JSON or CSV.
How it works
AI scan uses Claude, a large AI model made by Anthropic, to read the whole page in context, the way a person would. That's how it handles cursive, crossed-out words, tables and diagrams. Fast OCR uses Tesseract, an open-source text recognition engine, which runs right inside your browser. You can read more about how we handle your data in our privacy policy.
Who it's for
Students, teachers, researchers, family historians, small businesses and anyone else with a stack of paper they'd like to search, edit or share. If you have an idea that would make the tool more useful for you, we'd love to hear it.
Get in touch
Questions, feedback or a transcription that went wrong? Contact us and we'll get back to you.