> Source: https://txtfetch.com/languages/french
> Plain-text twin — every page on txtfetch.com has one. https://txtfetch.com/text

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# Extract text from French documents, œ and all.

French text is plain Unicode once it's born digital. The failure modes are a dropped ligature, a legacy encoding, or a typographic apostrophe the extractor misreads.

Français · Latin, with ligatures and diacritics

what-already-works

A born-digital French file, a Word document, a PDF with a real text layer, or an HTML page, needs no OCR at all. Tika reads its Unicode text layer directly. é, à, ç, and the œ ligature are each their own fixed code point, so the script itself isn't the hard part.

character-encodings

| encoding | seen in | note |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `Windows-1252 (CP1252)` | Older Word and Excel files, and email exported from legacy Windows systems. | Covers é, à, ç, and œ in a single byte each. Read as UTF-8 by mistake, every one of them garbles. |
| `ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)` | Older web pages and plain-text files that predate UTF-8. | Does not include œ at all. A file in this encoding often substitutes a placeholder character for it, well before extraction ever sees it. |

common-pitfalls

**œ in a word like cœur or œuvre splits into two separate letters, oe.**: A font or a PDF's internal character map never gave the ligature its own code point, or an editor auto-corrected it before the file was saved. This is a lost ligature, not a bug in extraction. Check the fix for ligatures and smart punctuation. Fix ligatures and smart punctuation →

**The space before a French question mark, colon, or exclamation point has vanished.**: French typography places a narrow non-breaking space before ; : ! ?, and some fonts or PDF producers drop it or substitute an ordinary space during layout. The words themselves are intact and in order. Treat the missing space as a style detail, not a data loss.

**An apostrophe in l'année or c'est renders as a box or a stray, unrelated character.**: The document used a typographic apostrophe (’), and the extractor's encoding guess didn't include it. Confirm the file's real encoding, then re-run extraction with it identified correctly. Fix garbled text from the wrong encoding →

chunking-and-tokens

French uses spaces between words, so a word-count chunker splits French text about as well as it splits English. The œ ligature counts as one visual character. An unfolded copy can carry two code points instead of one, which slightly skews a character-based token estimate. The chunk previewer's ~4-characters-per-token guide still holds up reasonably well overall.

ocr-status

A scanned French document needs OCR, and Tesseract's Latin-alphabet training covers most of French's letterforms. But the standard OCR tier ships English trained data plus script detection only (TESSDATA\_LANGS=eng osd). Accented letters and the œ ligature are where accuracy drops fastest on a low-resolution scan. For a scan where accuracy matters, request quality=premium, which routes a vision-language model instead of Tika. No accuracy figure is published for French OCR under either tier.

faq

**Does txtfetch detect or label the document's language?**: No. txtfetch extracts the text as written and hands it back as-is. It does not detect, tag, or translate a document's language. There is no language parameter to set.

**Can txtfetch OCR a scanned French document?**: Yes, but the standard OCR tier ships English trained data only (TESSDATA_LANGS=eng osd). Accented letters and the œ ligature are the first things to lose accuracy on a low-resolution scan. Request quality=premium for a hard scan.

**Why does cœur come back as coeur?**: The œ ligature lost its own code point somewhere upstream, usually in the font or the PDF's character map, not during extraction itself. See the ligature fix for the full explanation.

**Why is the space before a French question mark missing?**: French typography uses a narrow non-breaking space there, and some PDF producers drop or substitute it during layout. The words and their order are unaffected.

related-reading

-   [What comes back: text, Markdown, or JSON →](https://txtfetch.com/output)
-   [Glossary: ligature →](https://txtfetch.com/glossary/ligature)
-   [Chunk previewer →](https://txtfetch.com/tools/chunk-preview)
-   [Error reference →](https://txtfetch.com/docs/errors)
-   [Get an API key →](https://app.txtfetch.com/signup)

other-languages

-   [Spanish →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/spanish)
-   [German →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/german)
-   [Portuguese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/portuguese)
-   [Japanese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/japanese)
-   [Chinese →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/chinese)
-   [Korean →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/korean)
-   [Arabic →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/arabic)
-   [Russian →](https://txtfetch.com/languages/russian)
-   [All languages →](https://txtfetch.com/languages)

## Check your French scan first.

The free scan check tells you if a page needs OCR. It runs in your browser.

[Check a scan →](https://txtfetch.com/tools/image-ocr-check)

[Get an API key →](https://app.txtfetch.com/signup)