Read German text from photos and scans.

German documents people usually scan

• Rental contracts (Mietvertrag) and Nebenkostenabrechnung utility statements.
• Official mail from the Finanzamt, Bürgeramt, Ausländerbehörde or Krankenkasse.
• Invoices (Rechnung) and payslips (Gehaltsabrechnung) with IBANs and amounts to copy.
• Appliance and car manuals, often printed in very small type.
• Austrian and Swiss letters; note that Swiss German writes ss where Germany uses ß.

German letters and print to check

• Umlauts: a faint dot pair can be dropped, turning schön into schon or Bär into Bar.
• ß can be misread as B or β. Check words like Straße, Fuß and groß.
• Very long compound nouns may be split at a line break; rejoin them before you search.
• Numbers use a comma for decimals and a period for thousands (1.299,00 €).
• Old Fraktur (blackletter) print, common before about 1940, is not supported by this model and will mostly come out wrong.

How to do it, step by step

1. Click the button above. Scan → Text opens with German preselected.
2. Need a searchable PDF? Use the PDF links under the button instead. German stays chosen.
3. Choose the photo or scan of your German document.
4. Rotate the page upright if needed.
5. Press Recognize text. The first German run is slower while the language data loads.
6. Check umlauts and ß, then copy the text or download it as .txt.

Tips for better results

• Shoot small manual print close up, one column at a time, rather than the whole spread.
• Window envelopes and address blocks are easier to read if you crop them out first.
• When copying an IBAN or tax number, compare every digit with the original letter.

Open German OCR (image to text) →