An image is displayed on a touch screen. A user's underline gesture on the displayed image is detected. The area of the image touched by the underline gesture and a surrounding region approximate to the touched area are identified. Skew for text in the surrounding region is determined and compensated. A text region including the text is identified in the surrounding region and cropped from the image. The cropped image is transmitted to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, which processes the cropped image and returns OCR'ed text. The OCR'ed text is outputted.