# I've still a treasure in this world--A Picture Of Some Text **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 7, 2009, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972 "2009-06-07T02:06:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/1 "2009-06-07T02:06:28Z")
I’m disputing a bill from my former doctor. We have asked for and gotten a printout of all the charges we ever incurred, but it looks like it was typed up on the old Underwood, and then scanned into a PDF document, taking care that each page is slightly off true vertical. The result is that I’ve got about fourteen pages of text, but each page is a picture. I subscribe to a PDF conversion service, but the files come back as pictures. Granted, they are now MS Office pictures, but I still can’t edit the text. I’d like to convert them to spreadsheet form so I can work with the numbers, but so far I haven’t had any success doing so. Is there any way to convert text in an MS compatible picture to actual text? ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/2 "2009-06-07T02:12:30Z")
You need to use OCR - Optical Character Recognition software. There’s lots of different packages out there, but all of them do very poorly with crummy images. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/3 "2009-06-07T03:37:42Z")
Have you tried just selecting the text with the Acrobat text selection tool? I was surprised to see that it worked for a PDF I got that was clearly made up of scanned images. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/4 "2009-06-07T14:58:01Z")
You say they’re “MS office pictures”. Not quite sure what that is, but the MS Office Document Imaging tool does a decent job of OCR-ing text out of scans & jpgs and such and creating word docs from them. If you have Office Pro from 2000 or later, it is probably in your start menu under MS Office \>\> MS Office Tools \>\> MS Office Document Imaging. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/5 "2009-06-07T15:17:26Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > Have you tried just selecting the text with the Acrobat text selection tool? I was surprised to see that it worked for a PDF I got that was clearly made up of scanned images. That will only work if you converted it to a pdf from a MSWord file or something, not from a jpg or whatever made from a scan. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2009, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/6 "2009-06-08T03:25:30Z")
How long would it take you to get on a word processor and transcribe the text by hand? ---
**Author:** ![Fubaya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@Fubaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fubaya)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2009, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-still-a-treasure-in-this-world-a-picture-of-some-text/498972/7 "2009-06-08T15:48:47Z")
I hate companies that do things like that. I would call the DR’s office and tell them to send me something else. I’m not getting paid to convert their paperwork into something useable.