|
Home »
Microsoft Office
» Microsoft Word
Summary: Converting images of documents as stored in ".tif" or other image formats back to editable Word ".doc" files requires something known as OCR.
Yes and no. The problem is that your ".tif" file may have started out as a Word document, but it's not a Word document any more. Far from it, in fact. • ".tif" stands for "Tagged Image Format". As it's name implies, it's a format for storing images, or pictures, much like the ".jpg" images you might get off of your digital camera. If someone created a ".tif" of a Word document they did the equivalent of taking a picture of the document even though no camera was necessarily involved. Many screen capture programs will allow you to save a "picture" of a document on your screen as an image file. Some even go so far as to provide a faux printer driver that creates a series of image files when the document is "printed". There are approaches to converting an image of a document back to a real, editable, document. The good news is that it doesn't matter much whether the image is ".jpg", ".tif" or any of the other photo/image formats. The bad news is that it's not perfect, and often quite error prone. "The problem is that OCR is exceptionally difficult to
get right."
It's called "optical character recognition" or OCR. I've spoken about OCR recently when someone asked about scanning a document into Excel. OCR software takes a look at the picture of your document, examining the picture of each letter in that document, and attempts to determine what letter that picture represents. Advanced OCR software may even try to automatically figure out where paragraphs are and more. The problem is that OCR is exceptionally difficult to get right. For example "1" (one) and an "l" (lower case L) look very much alike. If the photo of the document is blurry or distorted, or even if the characters on the page use different fonts and styles, the OCR algorithm can get confused and produce the wrong results. Often close results, but still wrong. So to convert your ".tif" back to a Word document OCR is the place to start, but you'll still need to carefully proof-read the OCR results. Related:
• Recent Comments
Sir, I am scaning some text in *.tif file, How can i convert *.tif file word file with out contants changeing Posted by: Kanagaraj at June 8, 2007 11:07 PMDo let me know whether there is and free trail software through which i can convert tif files into microsoft waord without changing itts contents & formatting. Plz help me out Posted by: Rina at May 3, 2008 08:17 AMPost a comment on "How do I convert a ".tif" file to a Word ".doc" file?":
|
Archives Advertisers |
|