Free Program to convert PNG to Text?

mngerhold said:

If you are grabbing screen shots from web pages, why save them as pictures in the first place? Why not select the text (if you can) and copy.

OP wants text from images - not neccessarily webpages. Screenshots saved as images were used for testing.

So I downloaded Irfanview 32-bit along with KADMOS OCR Plugin and it seems to work okay.

So you'd need 32bit Irfanview because KADMOS is a 32bit plugin.

download: plugins/kadmos/

Note: You have to draw a box around the selected text with your mouse in order to extract it.

capture2text (free) works well- I use it with tenforums posts where users submit screenshots.. draw a rectangle or capture text in a 'bubble' to OCR it.
Capture2Text

E.g. from the above poor quality text on the non-expanded screenshot:

^ input
v output

on your pictures without letting a flurry of menus displays images as if they were pages in a book - :

Many languages, copes with text at an angle.. even does text -> speech. User configurable hotkeys.

Also can be run from the command line and can process a batch of image files (apparently- not tried it!)

Context menu: Right click, 'OCR' to clipboard.
I have just added it to my context menu so I can simply rt click an image file containing text, click the Capture2text icon, and the text then appears in my clipboard.
(I could specify a file as output).

mngerhold said:

If you are grabbing screen shots from web pages, why save them as pictures in the first place? Why not select the text (if you can) and copy.

I can not just select the text. What I need is a way to get this as a png and then edit it so the text will not have so many blank lines in it.

- - - Updated - - -

Thank you all. Still trying but I MUST have software that will let me scroll. I have Nimbus that does a great job, but then it saves it as a PNG file. So that is why I need software. Will infanview let me scroll?

Would it be acceptable to OCR the whole file with a couple of clicks?
No need to worry about scrolling then- and faster.

Callender said:

Some more info to scan images from desktop instead of opening in browser (video guide included)

 How to use Copyfish Free OCR Software for Chrome and Firefox

   Note

The desktop screenshot is loaded inside the Copyfish in your local browser.
It never leaves your machine, and is not send to any cloud service.

But I am not sure copyfish will let me scroll the web page will it?

I'm not sure because I've uninstalled Irfanview and removed Copyfish.

Maybe I will re-test.

Callender said:

I'm not sure because I've uninstalled Irfanview and removed Copyfish.

Maybe I will re-test.

OK, and I can try Screen Translator again. I did get to that C++ screen and will see what happens.

Capture2text doesn't support scrolling properly on trying a few more times.

But I repeat- a couple of clicks and you can submit a whole image file to be OCR'd. No need to draw rectangles.

In addition:

Irfanview displays a scrolled capture like this:

The OCR plugin shows an out of memory error when used on that type of image.