Is there a free program that...

[milk is white]

...can take words from an image and put it into text form? For example, if I wanted to scan in an image of a book, I know that I can have a copy of the image, but can I put it into text form, where I can edit the words?

 

[Craig]

What you are looking for is OCR (Optical character reader) software. This converts text in images to plain text. Back in my Windows days, I had an old HP Scanjet. The driver CD that came with it had this type of program bundled on it. I would assume that most decent scanners would come with this software nowadays, as I bought my HP about 6 years ago IIRC.

If you are just looking for the software and are not buying a scanner; then I'm not sure! Sorry :/

 

[cazabam]

You could try DigitEyeOCR, which is a freebie OCR program.

edit: I've just had a play and can't get it to work at all. You may have more luck ...

 

[giulio]

Acrobat professional has it built in.