Need to convert .tiff to text

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Greetings fellow Mac-ers. I have several .tiff files containing some lists that I need to convert to text to allow Word or Pages to edit as text.

What is the best, easiest, and cheapest way to do this?

Thanks!
David
 
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One thought is to open in Preview, save as .pdf (File>Export>PDF) and then copy and paste onto new Word/Pages document.
 
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One thought is to open in Preview, save as .pdf (File>Export>PDF) and then copy and paste onto new Word/Pages document.
Just copies a picture in to Pages. I need to covert the picture to text. How do I do that please?

I just have Adobe reader. Are you asuming I have full-blown adobe?

Also just tried Save as Text from adobe and got a blank document.

Other options please?


Thanks!
David
 

vansmith

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As far as I know, you can't convert a picture to text unless you use something like optical character recognition software. Can whoever you got this from send it to you in a more reasonable (parseable) format?
 
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As far as I know, you can't convert a picture to text unless you use something like optical character recognition software. Can whoever you got this from send it to you in a more reasonable (parseable) format?
Nope, he can't. He's less knowledgeable than I :)

So, we're back my to original question, perhaps a little better defined:

Is there a quick/easy/cheap way to convert .tiff containing text to an editable text format?

If this means OCR, then the question becomes:
What's the easiest/cheapest OCR program for MAC. Isn't there something native (comes with os x)?

Thanks!
David
 
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If you save the doc as PDF I believe Google docs can do the OCR conversion for you

You will have to sign up for Google docs and give it a try
 

vansmith

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If you save the doc as PDF I believe Google docs can do the OCR conversion for you

You will have to sign up for Google docs and give it a try
Oh, this has made my day. This is fantastic. I just tried it now with a PDF where the "text" wasn't really text at all (like a scanned document). It did an admirable job - my biggest problem was the differentiation of words (it combined a few words) but other than that, it worked pretty well.

It creates a new document (assuming you tell GD to do this when you upload the document) wherein it inserts the text between pages. In other words, it will show one page of the PDF, the translated text, then the next pages, translated text and so on. It makes it nice and easy to compare the content to the original.
 

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This will make me look like a genius the next time someone asks about this. Thanks Louishen.
 

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