Free online BMP to TEXT converter

Source format: BMP

BMP (Bitmap) is a raster image format originally developed for Windows. It stores pixel data with little or no compression, which makes it simple and widely compatible, but often much larger than modern image formats. BMP files are commonly used in Windows graphics workflows, legacy software, simple image editing, and situations where an uncompressed or minimally processed image is needed.

Target format: text file

A text file usually means a plain-text document such as .txt. Unlike an image file, a text file contains readable characters rather than pixels. Converting BMP to text is not a normal image format conversion; it usually means one of two things: OCR (extracting text visible inside the image) or ASCII/Unicode art (representing the image with characters). The main advantage of a text file is that it is small, editable, searchable, and easy to share across almost any device.

How to perform the conversion

If your BMP contains printed or handwritten text, the best approach is OCR. Use desktop OCR software such as Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, or Adobe Acrobat if you already have it. A practical free workflow is:

1. Open the BMP in an OCR-capable app.
2. Run text recognition on the image.
3. Review the recognized text for errors.
4. Save or export the result as .txt.

For example, with Tesseract you can run tesseract input.bmp output txt to create output.txt. If you prefer a graphical workflow, open the image in your OCR program and choose File → Export → Text or Save As → Plain text, depending on the application.

If you want the image converted into character art rather than extracted text, use a tool that supports image-to-ASCII conversion. In that case, the output is still a text file, but it will contain symbols arranged to resemble the picture rather than readable words.

You can also convert the file on 101convert.com for free, without installing any software, if the site offers a BMP-to-text workflow for your specific need.

Notes on quality and limitations

BMP to text is inherently lossy when using OCR, because the conversion depends on how clearly the text appears in the image. Results are best with high-resolution, sharp, high-contrast BMP files that contain clean printed text. Handwriting, skewed scans, decorative fonts, shadows, and noisy backgrounds reduce accuracy. OCR may also miss line breaks, punctuation, tables, or mixed layouts, so manual proofreading is usually necessary.

If the BMP does not contain actual text, there is no meaningful way to convert it into readable text without using ASCII art or another symbolic representation. Also, because BMP is often uncompressed, the source file size does not affect OCR quality as much as image clarity does.