#Fontforge illustrator pdf#

So how usefully-editable the resulting Word document is, is dependent upon the details of the specific case.īefore you erase the text make sure it is a flattened tiff.īecause if it is not a flattened tiff the text may still be alive. The resulting Word document is often not at all built the way (number and arrangement of objects) you would actually build it from scratch in Word. How successful you are in this attempt highly depends on the quality of the original raster image.

#Fontforge illustrator pdf#

And, Acrobat Pro can also (at least try to) export a PDF as a Word file. So although you can use an autotracing program to create vector paths that are similar in shape to the clumps of pixels that you are calling 'text' in your image, the result will no more be actual text that you can edit than is the raster bitmap you started with.Īcrobat Pro, on the other hand, does have a built-in OCR feature. Autotracing is another kind of program that merely tries to draw vector paths around areas of same-colored pixels. Whomever is telling you otherwise is confusing autotracing with OCR. Illustrator does not contain any OCR feature. OCR is far from perfect and is dependent upon good-quality raster images. There are optical character recognition (OCR) programs which try to programmatically 'recognize' the arrangements of adjacent pixels in a raster image as text characters, and then create actual text objects containing those characters. So there's much more to an actual text object than just the image on your screen that looks like the characters. But just having vector paths that are shaped like letters is not the same as having editable text.Īctual text is an object into which you can type using your keyboard to cause your operating system to retrieve and display from the font file the particular vector path that is shaped like the letter that corresponds to the key you press. So when one says that 'text is vector', all one is really saying is that fonts contain vector paths that look like letters. But that's not all there is to making them text. Yes, the character shapes contained in (most) fonts are vector graphics.

Second, vector graphics are just shapes defined mathematically. So when you say your TIFF image 'contains text', all you are really saying is that it has some arrangements of pixels that look like letters.

People tell me I have to convert the drawings, or at least the text, to vector graphics.įirst, TIFF is a raster image format.