How to extricate text from an all-text .jpg?
 

On a web site I came upon a block of text, hundreds of words, in a language I do not know very well, that for some reason was in the form of a .jpg and so the text cannot not be moved to the box of a machine translator or otherwise manipulated in any useful way. Short of tediously copying it word-by-word manually into a text-editing file or sending it as an attachment to a polyglot friend and asking for help in translating it, is there any other way to deal with text that is in the form of a .jpg and get the text out of its prison, so to speak? I can't imagine why anyone would put it on a web site in the form of an image. It was not the caption of a picture, and the .jpg neither contained nor referred to any pictorial material -- it was just solid text. (If this datum is relevant in any way, the text is white on a black background, and fills almost the entire frame.) It appears to be an open letter of some kind to visitors to the site, from the man whose work is displayed there, but why in the world put it up as a .jpg?

You need an OCR (optical character reader) program or service. There are locally run programs, or online ones. Either type would need a copy of the .jpg file, or some would accept the URL of the file. I can't recommend any specific program, but here is one search results page - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=palemoon&q=OCR&ia=about, or you can just type OCR into another search engine.

- Bruce

I've never done this, but maybe this will help?

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/1459...2007-and-2010/