Monday, August 20, 2018

How to Convert a Text to Image and Image Back to Text

In the digital world, there is a big difference between real text and an image that looks like text, though it is not always obvious to the user. Fortunately, for those that will come across this post, there are ways to turn image or text into the other.

How to Convert a Text to Image

  1. Select the text you want be photographed.
  2. Press CTRL-C to copy it to the clipboard.
  3. Open Paint 3D in Windows 10 or regular Paint in Windows 8.1.
  4. Select “this is the free image editor” that comes with Windows.
  5. Now press CTRL-Vto paste the text as an image,
  6. Save the file.
In our experience this works best for older versions of Windows if you are using Microsoft Word. However, for Windows 10, it should work with pretty much any program that displays text. If you are writing in another program where this trick did not work, you can use Windows’ Snipping Tool to grab any portion of the screen and save it as an image file. Then, if your version of Windows pre-dates the Snipping Tool, you can use the following steps;
  1. Press your keyboard’s Print Screen 
  2. Open Paint (or any other image editor) and paste the screen.
  3. Crop the image to just the text.

Converting Image to Text

This process requires optical character recognition (OCR) software. But that did not mean you need a scanner or any costly commercial software.
Your way out is the use of Microsoft’s OneNote, which has been free since 2015 and comes pre-installed on Windows 10.
  1. Copy the image.
  2. Paste it into OneNote.
  3. If you’re using the regular desktop version right-click the image in OneNote.
  4. Select Copy Text from Picture.



In case you are using the Windows Store version.
  1. Right-click the image.
  2. Select
  3. Copy Text.
In some cases, the desktop application is much more reliable than the Windows Store application for copying text. However, the newer version of OneNote should still work fine in most cases. If it did not work right away give it a few minutes and then try again.
You can also use the Web service Free OCR. Upload the image file (maximum size: 7MB) and click Start. The text will appear in a frame, from which you can copy it and paste it anywhere. Optical character recognition (OCR) does a good job, but sometimes it adds extra characters meaning you may have to clean up the text to make it more presentable.
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