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How do I convert a ".tif" file to a Word ".doc" file?

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Summary: Converting images of documents as stored in ".tif" or other image formats back to editable Word ".doc" files requires something known as OCR.

Is there a way to convert a file received as file.tif (originally a Word text .doc) to file.doc?

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.

Article C3012 - May 2, 2007

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Recent Comments
22 Comments

Got it! Right click the file and click OPEN WITH and select MICROSOFT OFFICE DOCUMENT IMAGING. Then press the logo with the little arrow and W that exports to Word. Worked great!

Posted by: Na nach nachma nachman meuman at December 1, 2009 6:43 PM

Hi, thanks for all the information. now it is easy to convert any image to editable and searchable doc, pdf, html files using ocr software. however, good quality ocr software are not available for download. The only ocr software I was able to freely download and try was Image to OCR Converter available at http://products.softsolutionslimited.com/img2ocr/index.htm It does a fairly good job of ocr processing.

Posted by: Ankit Nagpal at January 17, 2010 4:41 PM

Hi

Is there will be any difference between the text converted from the image using a OCR technology and normal typed text except for the errors in the text converted using ocr?

Posted by: 313624 at January 30, 2010 9:43 PM

i want to convert tiff image to notpad?
can any one help me

Posted by: rishi at February 18, 2010 8:32 AM

i have 1 file in TIF format and like to convert in txt file format

Posted by: amit at March 11, 2010 1:11 AM

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