Guide
How to Clean OCR Text from a Resume or Form
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools extract text from images and scans, but the output is rarely clean. You usually end up with broken lines, strange spacing, or garbled characters that need fixing before the text is usable. Here's how to deal with it.
What OCR output typically looks like
When you extract text from a scanned resume or form using an OCR tool, the raw output often has these problems:
Software En gineer with 5 years experience
React and Node.js developer
Experience : 5 years
Name John Smith Email
Which preset to use
Use this for most resume and CV text. It merges wrapped lines into paragraphs and preserves section breaks.
Use this for structured forms, invoices, and tables extracted as text. Behaves the same as Resume but the label is more descriptive.
Use this if each line is a separate item that should stay on its own line — for example, a list of skills or bullet points.
Use this for everything else — general paragraphs, letters, and documents that don't fit the above.
Step-by-step
What the tool cannot fix
- Substituted characters — if OCR read 'l' as '1' or 'O' as '0', those need manual correction
- Missing words — if the scanner missed a word entirely, no cleanup tool can recover it
- Garbled text from very low-resolution or rotated scans
- Non-Latin scripts — the cleanup logic is designed for Latin-alphabet text