I took pictures of documents on my iPhone and I want upload them onto my Mac and then what do I need to do next if I need edit the documents?

Question

I have taken pictures of the documents I need and I have them saved on my iPhone. I want to somehow take the picture of the document and either upload or convert it so I can edit the document and then print it out so it actually looks like the original document and not a picture of the document. Is this even possible, or do I need the actual document on my computer?

The only thing I have is a picture of the document, but its a very clear picture. I just want to either upload it into word documents so I can edit it and then print it out so it looks like the original document and not a picture of the document.

I have a MacBook Air and I would really appreciate if someone would let me know if this is even possible or do I need to upload the original document in order to be able to edit it? Either way I don't know how to do either of those things.

Answer 1

What you need is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software which attempts to recognize characters and punctuation in an image of a document.

Tesseract or an alternative for the Mac needs to be downloaded and installed.

OCR software does not produce perfect documents: line-breaks may need to be removed, spelling must be checked and other issues fixed. It is still often faster to use OCR and repair the resulting document than to retype it.

N.B. The better the image of the document, the more reliable will be OCR conversion. For best results, scan the document or use a good camera, with good, flat lighting, placed directly above the flattened page. The image can then be improved by increasing contrast, reducing number of colors (bit planes) and removing some blemishes with an image editor.