Convert "Text image" to "Editable text"

prabudass has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need to convert "text image" to "editable text" in illustrator. I can't found any option for this in illustrator.
But in acrobat using the "OCR" option we can change the text image back to editable text. We need to automate that process through programmatically.
Is it possible through perl. Kindly advice and provide me the reference.

Thanks in advance,
Prabudass

Comment on Convert "Text image" to "Editable text"

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Re: Convert "Text image" to "Editable text" by marto (Cardinal) on Nov 06, 2008 at 12:47 UTC
If the source material is images check out Image::OCR::Tesseract, if you have a PDF consisting of one image per page see PDF::OCR, or alternatively PDF::OCR2. All of the above require Tesseract, see Re: parse content of PDF file for a further information. Martin	[reply]
Re: Convert "Text image" to "Editable text" by leocharre (Priest) on Nov 06, 2008 at 14:52 UTC
As mentioned above, tesseract is an open source project that works very well. PDF::OCR, PDF::OCR2 are perl interfaces to it, makes some image conversion decisions for you, etc. I've also tested out gnu ocrad, ran some benchmark and output tests on same material etc- it doesn't work as well. This stuff works well on posix, these are mostly linux type boxes. On windows there's something called iris - but it's pay, it costs a lot, and you have to pay extra for an sdk. So you can't really code with it out of the box.	[reply]
Re: Convert "Text image" to "Editable text" by andreas1234567 (Vicar) on Nov 06, 2008 at 12:18 UTC
What have you tried so far? I tested Tesseract once with reasonable success, given that the input image text was single-column and had no graphical elements. -- No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]	[reply]
Re: Convert "Text image" to "Editable text" by Anonymous Monk on Nov 06, 2008 at 12:11 UTC
search for ocr on cpan and you'll find ways to convert images to text. As for illustrator, you can use inkscape to convert the files to svg, and then you can manipulate them with XML::Twig (or other xml modules) or with SVG::Parser/SVG.	[reply]