You will certainly have had the need to copy or modify the scanning of some PDF documents or images.
But the file is an image and consequently the text cannot be copied and pasted into a text editor, apparently, you have to redo everything by hand.
In reality, there are OCR (Optical character recognition) software that can recognize and capture and copy text from an image or a PDF.
10 programs to capture and copy text from pdf and images
- Capture2Text is a free program for Windows that allows you to capture texts from any image, file, and program by selecting a portion of the Windows desktop.
The selected part of the screen is analyzed by the software and translated into editable text using OCR technology. - ABBYY FineReader is one of the most famous and used OCR programs in the world.
It is a complete solution that allows you to scan and get editable text documents, convert PDF to Word files and simple text files, capture text from images and more. - Tesseract-OCR its technology is perhaps the best of all free OCR software. Works in Unix / Linux environment. Its development is sponsored by Google. Many software below have been developed based on this.
- FreeOCR– compiled version for Windows of Tesseract-OCR; It is considered the best software to capture and copy text, it also supports the English language.
- TopOCR– designed to be used with images acquired by digital cameras and mobile phones. It is multilingual (supports English), and has many interesting features, including a built-in Text-to-Speech software. Works on Windows.
- OCR Desktop Application– recognizes 4 million font variations and supports the English language.
- simpleOCR– supports only two languages, English and French, but others will be added soon. Works on Windows.
- freeOCR– very usable, supports the English language. It accepts various image formats, scans and pdfs, and returns txt and word. Works with Windows.
- PDF OCR– works on Windows and supports various languages, including English.
- Omniformat– is a program able to convert various types of files; downloading a special separate form, it also performs the function of OCR software- it is based on Tesseract-OCR, so it works well for the English language but worse for the other languages.
