Hindi OCR services
Scanned Hindi books, registers, court files and government records converted into accurate, searchable XML, EPUB or plain text — with a measured accuracy report for every batch.
Used in North and central India — the largest language base in the country.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Hindi OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Hindi — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
The shirorekha joins everything
The horizontal headline runs across whole words, so character segmentation cannot rely on white space between letters the way Latin OCR does.
Conjuncts and half letters
Two or three consonants fuse into a single new shape. There are hundreds of these ligatures, and old metal-type documents use forms modern fonts have dropped.
Matras above and below
Vowel marks sit outside the main band. Aggressive de-noising on a poor scan removes them, which silently changes the word.
Handwritten annotations
Government files carry handwritten margin notes and stamps over printed text, needing separate handling rather than one pass.
Hindi documents we handle
- Land and revenue records
- Court judgments
- Gazettes and notifications
- Newspapers and periodicals
- School and university records
- Government scheme files
Typically for Central and state government departments, courts, universities and Hindi publishers.
How a Hindi batch runs
- 1Ingest
Bulk PDF intake from any source — scans, photos, government portals. Page splitting, de-skew, de-noise.
- 2OCR in the right script
Models for Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Urdu and Latin scripts, tuned on Indian government and publishing layouts: tables, multi-column, mixed scripts.
- 3Structure to XML
Fields, tables and hierarchy mapped to your schema — JATS, TEI, DocBook, ONIX, or a custom XSD. Validated on every file.
- 4Quality checks
Automated confidence scoring plus human review of low-confidence pages. You get an accuracy report, not a promise.
- 5Deliver & search
XML/EPUB/JSON/CSV delivery, or a ready-made search interface like the one we built for 2002 voter rolls.
Hindi OCR questions
- How accurate is Hindi OCR?
- It depends far more on scan quality than on the language. On clean modern print we reach high accuracy; on twenty-year-old photocopies the honest answer is that some pages need human review. We run a free 50-page sample of your own documents first and send you the measured accuracy before you commit to anything.
- Can you read handwritten Hindi?
- Handwriting is a separate and harder problem than print, and results vary with the hand. We assess it on your sample and tell you plainly whether it is viable, rather than promising and disappointing you later.
- What formats do I get back?
- Validated XML in your schema, EPUB 3, JSON, CSV or plain Unicode text — plus an accuracy report per batch. You own all output.
- Do you keep the table and page structure?
- Yes. For records like registers and land documents the structure matters as much as the text, so we map fields, rows and columns into your schema rather than dumping a wall of characters.
- Is my Hindi data sent outside India?
- No. Processing runs on our own Python pipeline on servers in India, and we do not upload your documents to third-party AI services without your written agreement.
Send 50 Hindi pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.