How export text shown by GIF/JPG to plain text ?

Hello you grpahics specialists. Can you help me?

How can I use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert text visible
in the viewed mage of a GIF, JPG, BMP, etc into plain text? (I
am not referring to metadata such as EXIF.)

When I used the standalone freeware 'Simple OCR' it replied it
could not convert my JPG image (which showed approx eight short
lines of text) into to plain text.

I don't want to buy any special OCR application for this.

Can PS or PSP do this natively? If a plugin is needed then I hope
it is freeware!

----

As a seperate idea, is it possible to get one of the deskop search
applications like Google, Yahoo or Copernic to use some optional
image-text extraction feature to do what I want? I believe such
plugins are vecoming available but the problem is that I do NOT
want a search utility to extract the *ALL* the text of *ALL* the
JPGs on my hard drive!!!

I want to extract from just ONE jpeg and I guess this may be hard
or impossible to set up in a Desktop Searcher.

Any help is welcomed.

Franklin wrote:
> Hello you grpahics specialists. Can you help me?
>
> How can I use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to convert text
> visible in the viewed mage of a GIF, JPG, BMP, etc into
> plain text? (I am not referring to metadata such as EXIF.)
>
> When I used the standalone freeware 'Simple OCR' it replied
> it could not convert my JPG image (which showed approx
> eight short lines of text) into to plain text.
>
> I don't want to buy any special OCR application for this.
>
> Can PS or PSP do this natively? If a plugin is needed then
> I hope it is freeware!
> [snip]

Neither PS nor PSP does optical character recognition. The main
difference between the expensive OCR programs that work well and the
toy ones that come with scanners is the flexibility to work with
text of many fonts, sizes, and colors on different backgrounds.

You might be able to use PS or PSP to clean up the text and
background to improve the performance of your free OCR program. Go
for pure black text on a pure white background.
--
Fred Hiltz, fhiltz at yahoo dot com