How export text shown by GIF/JPG to plain text ?

[Franklin]

Hello you grpahics specialists. Can you help me?

How can I use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert text visible
in the viewed mage of a GIF, JPG, BMP, etc into plain text? (I
am not referring to metadata such as EXIF.)

When I used the standalone freeware 'Simple OCR' it replied it
could not convert my JPG image (which showed approx eight short
lines of text) into to plain text.

I don't want to buy any special OCR application for this.

Can PS or PSP do this natively? If a plugin is needed then I hope
it is freeware!

----

As a seperate idea, is it possible to get one of the deskop search
applications like Google, Yahoo or Copernic to use some optional
image-text extraction feature to do what I want? I believe such
plugins are vecoming available but the problem is that I do NOT
want a search utility to extract the *ALL* the text of *ALL* the
JPGs on my hard drive!!!

I want to extract from just ONE jpeg and I guess this may be hard
or impossible to set up in a Desktop Searcher.

Any help is welcomed.

 

[Fred Hiltz]

Hello you grpahics specialists. Can you help me?

How can I use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert text
visible in the viewed mage of a GIF, JPG, BMP, etc into
plain text? (I am not referring to metadata such as EXIF.)

When I used the standalone freeware 'Simple OCR' it replied
it could not convert my JPG image (which showed approx
eight short lines of text) into to plain text.

I don't want to buy any special OCR application for this.

Can PS or PSP do this natively? If a plugin is needed then
I hope it is freeware!
[snip]

Neither PS nor PSP does optical character recognition. The main
difference between the expensive OCR programs that work well and the
toy ones that come with scanners is the flexibility to work with
text of many fonts, sizes, and colors on different backgrounds.

You might be able to use PS or PSP to clean up the text and
background to improve the performance of your free OCR program. Go
for pure black text on a pure white background.

 

[Harry Limey]

(which showed approx eight short

lines of text)

8 short lines? It must take longer setting up the OCR software and then
proofing it, than it would take to type it out manually.

 

[Chuck]

Older OCR software (dont' know too much about the new stuff) require certain
resolutions to recognize the text. You see, the OCR program doesn't "read"
like we do - it basis it's decisions upon the shapes in the images to match
letters in it's program.

So, if your image is not readable or not the "expected" resolution or not
the image type the program requires . . . then you're out of luck.

Hint: Find out what the image requirement is before you try the OCR . . .

 

[HandyAndy]

Hello you grpahics specialists. Can you help me?

How can I use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert text visible
in the viewed mage of a GIF, JPG, BMP, etc into plain text? (I
am not referring to metadata such as EXIF.)

Like others have already answered, you will need some good OCR software for
this. I don't know of any actual "freeware" that will do this, but here's
work-around that you might try ....

Microtek Scanners bundle their products with their ScanWizard program
interface (a very good one I might add). Included in their ScanWizard is
the fully functional ABBYY FineReader OCR engine. One of the best OCR
engines that I know of.

You can install this software without having the scanner connected to your
computer. Updates to the software are the complete package (including the
ABBYY FineReader OCR engine), not just the updated files.

You can find them here:

http://195.11.224.13/english/support/pcfiles.htm#ScanWizard

See if you can use the ABBYY FineReader OCR software bundled with
ScanWizard 5. Get v5.76 as that's the last one I know of that worked with
my old scanner. I don't know about later versions.

p.s. For those of you with older scanners from Microtek, try using their
updated software for later models. My old scanner performs just like their
latest ones, just by using their newer software. It micro-steps in the
finer resolutions just fine and implements all the new commands in the
software just fine. Just because your model # isn't listed for that
particular version of ScanWizard, doesn't mean it won't work with it. Not
all will, but I know my old "close-out special" $60 scanner acts like a
$350 one with a free software update.