editing text from a jpeg

claire07

I've scanned a lot of pages from an old book and saved as a jpeg but now I'd like to copy and paste and edit bits of the text to make it more up to date. Any ideas how to do this and I can't seem to copy or edit it in the jpeg.

david39

You can't use a word processor to directly edit text that is held as a picture file, like a .jpeg.

If you are trying to "lift" the text out of the picture and then edit it to store and edit in a text file (like a Word document) you will need an intermediate process to convert it from .jpeg to a .doc (Word's file format) or the more general format .txt.

There are programs called Optical Character Recognition programs that will do this for you - commonly callled OCR programs. If you Google "Free OCR Software" there are plenty to choose from and also it will throw up some pages of advice.

It's a long time since I used one, so they have probably advanced a lot since the last time I tried them. When I did so, you needed to scan the picture into the software with a scanner and then the sofware would read the text and output it as a .doc or a .txt file. Nowadays, you might be able to skip the scanning stage - modern software may read directly from the jpeg file.

Maybe someone else can fill you in on the more modern software.

OK_Sauce

The OCR software is normally bundled with a scanner. You may have a disk already.

JasX

Alternatively:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_character_recognition_software

kevin.rd

definitely google it, they have the answer to everything!

Aiadi

I have used this and find it satisfactory (Also small, free and portable).

http://www.topocr.com/

claire07

Thanks for all the replies. I'll look for the disc that came with the scanner later but if not I'll try the other suggestions. I'm just relieved I don't have to type the info out from scratch.