Punjabi OCR services
Scanned Punjabi 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 Punjab, Chandigarh and parts of Haryana and Delhi.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Punjabi OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Punjabi — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Three scripts on one page
Punjab land records routinely mix Gurmukhi, Devanagari and English — often within a single row of a jamabandi. The model has to identify script per region before reading it.
Subscript letters
Pairin akhar attach below the base character, putting content beneath the baseline like Telugu and Kannada.
Headline plus tight spacing
Gurmukhi carries a headline similar to Devanagari, with the same loss of white-space cues between letters.
Old registers and handwriting
Revenue registers are handwritten in varying hands across decades of entries.
Punjabi documents we handle
- Jamabandi and land revenue records
- Court judgments
- Punjabi literature for EPUB
- Religious and institutional archives
- Agricultural and mandi records
Typically for Punjab and Haryana High Court, revenue departments, Panjab University and Punjabi publishers.
How a Punjabi 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.
Punjabi OCR questions
- How accurate is Punjabi 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 Punjabi?
- 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 Punjabi 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 Punjabi pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.