Free online TIFF to TXT converter

Source format: TIFF

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a high-quality raster image format widely used in scanning, publishing, archiving, and professional photography. It is popular in scanners, document management systems, print workflows, and image editors because it can store images with minimal or no compression, preserve detail, and support multiple pages in one file. TIFF files are often used for documents, receipts, forms, books, and archival scans where image fidelity matters more than file size.

Target format: TXT

TXT is a plain text format that stores only readable characters with no layout, fonts, images, or formatting. It is useful for text extraction, indexing, scripting, data processing, and editing in any text editor. The main advantage of TXT is its broad compatibility and tiny file size. In a TIFF to TXT conversion, the goal is usually to extract text from a scanned image using OCR (optical character recognition).

How to perform the conversion

The best method depends on whether your TIFF already contains selectable text or is just an image scan. For most TIFF files, you need OCR to convert the visible text into editable plain text.

1. Use the built-in converter on 101convert.com if you want a quick conversion without installing software. Upload the .tiff file, choose TXT as the output, and start the conversion. This is convenient for single-page scans or small batches.
2. For better OCR accuracy, use desktop OCR software such as ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Pro, or Tesseract. Open the TIFF file in the OCR tool, run text recognition, then export or save the recognized text as .txt.
3. In ABBYY FineReader, open the TIFF file, verify the detected language, review the recognized text, then choose File → Save As → Text or Export → Plain Text.
4. In Adobe Acrobat Pro, open the TIFF as a document image, run OCR, then export the recognized content to text if your version supports that workflow. Acrobat is often better for document cleanup and searchable PDFs than for direct TXT export.
5. With Tesseract, run OCR from the command line. A typical command is tesseract input.tiff output -l eng, which creates output.txt. You can replace eng with another language code if needed.

If your TIFF contains multiple pages, make sure the OCR tool supports multi-page TIFF files. Some tools will process all pages automatically, while others may require splitting the file first.

Notes on quality, compatibility, and limitations

TIFF to TXT is not a direct format conversion; it is usually an image-to-text OCR process. Because of that, the output quality depends heavily on scan clarity, font type, page skew, resolution, and language settings. Clean, high-resolution scans produce much better results than blurry or handwritten pages.

Formatting is usually lost in TXT output. Tables, columns, headers, footers, and page layout may be flattened into plain lines of text or omitted entirely. If you need to preserve layout, consider exporting to DOCX or a searchable PDF instead of TXT.

Handwriting, stamps, faded text, and low-contrast scans can reduce OCR accuracy. For best results, use a straightened, high-contrast TIFF and choose the correct OCR language. If the TIFF is already a text-based image embedded in a document workflow, the conversion may be much more accurate than with a photographed page.