Conquer the impossible- copy and paste text from a scanned image

Old technologies got you down?

Fret not, there is an easy fix for your dilemma. When someone sends you a scanned document as an image instead of a PDF that you can edit, copy and paste from or process with digital signatures, there is a way to get that text from the document through Google’s gttext which is an open source Windows based software that uses optical character recognition to scan text and extract it so you can copy it into another document of your choosing (or in geek speak, “The basic level of work is at a pixel detection, making possible to group regions to form the glyph or even use a direct editing to get the choice”).

“Once installed,” says Lifehacker, “GTText lets you select an image file, load it, and then highlight the area where you’d like the app to translate the image into text. When the translation is complete, a pop-up window will appear that lets you highlight the text and copy it. If the app didn’t get it quite right, you can click “try again.” GTText recognizes BMP, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG images, and is available for Windows only.”