# Can I convert photos to text?



## lola2001 (Jan 29, 2001)

I know, probably a really stupid question.

A friend of mine scanned a booklet for me and saved it in PNG format. Now all the pages are just pictures. 

I'd like to convert it to some sort of text file so I can download it to my ebookwise device.

Is this possible?


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## TRS-80 vet (Jun 18, 2005)

lola2001 said:


> I know, probably a really stupid question.
> 
> A friend of mine scanned a booklet for me and saved it in PNG format. Now all the pages are just pictures.
> 
> ...


You can _add_ text, if you open the images (files) in a graphics editing application, _or_, you can convert the images into text-editable documents with an optical character recognition application, such as Omnipage.

The OCR would be ideal for what you've got, but familiarity with a graphics app is also a good thing.


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## telecom69 (Oct 12, 2001)

Perhaps this site may be of help ? http://www.sharewareconnection.com/titles/convert-text-to-jpeg.htm

or this one http://www.omniformat.com/


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

Since your friend has a scanner ... They should have been able to scan the pages to a text file to start with.
Images can be converted to text but it takes some expensive software and high resolution scans are needed.


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## slipe (Jun 27, 2000)

You might try this: http://www.simpleocr.com/


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## ferrija1 (Apr 11, 2006)

Noyb said:


> Since your friend has a scanner ... They should have been able to scan the pages to a text file to start with.
> Images can be converted to text but it takes some expensive software and high resolution scans are needed.


I have a HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-One (it's a great printer, but they don't sell it anymore) that cost $250 and it scans and converts documents with text on them into PDFs, searchable PDFs, Rich Text, HTML, or text. It works great.


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## ferrija1 (Apr 11, 2006)

lola2001 said:


> I know, probably a really stupid question.


_"There's no such thing as a stupid question, but they're the easiest to answer!"_

http://jocr.sourceforge.net/

http://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html

http://www.oocr.org/


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