Searching image files for text

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A user has a 680 page image file (tif) that she wants to be able to search. I could always scan the document in but thought there must be an easier way to accomplish this. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

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Hi Joanne,

I’m sure there will be other suggestions (much better than mine)…but here’s my :

You might want to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software (included with almost any scanner) to convert the TIF format into a text format such as RTF.

As far as I know (and I may be corrected on this) the TIF format is a Raster graphic – meaning that each pixel holds color information, similar to a BMP. Since that’s the case, it’s not possible to search for text in that format.

HTH

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Thanks for your response Mark. That’s exactly what I’ve ended up doing. I’m loading the image into OmniPage Pro and then running it through the OCR process. I’ve run into some trouble with low system resources but am having the hardware guys work on that. Thanks again.

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There is a shareware program called SnagIt which, I think, can do a sort of OCR capture of text in screenshots.

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I’ve tried SnagIt! and found it easy to use, haven’t found an excuse to buy the full product. As Gary stated it does OCR from screen captures. This is the link to the home siteSnagIt Ver. 5.0 Copyright

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