I quite often find pictures (charts, pies etc.) on the web (or in pdf
files) that I later use in my publications. However, I cannot perform
cut and paste operation, assome editors demand data, or they want
picture to have differentcolors, or axis descritpion has to be in
different font.
So quite often I spend a lot of time finding data that would match the
picture, I manually enter the data into Excel. For example recent Bank
of England governor made a speech discussing horizontal Phillips
curve, and that speech had a chart of inflation/unemployment points. I
wanted to quote this speech in my paper, but I needed to go to UK stat
office to collect the data, which took me about an hour and I had to
lear how to navigate there, which is the knowledge I do not need.
My question is this. Is there any software available, that would read
a picture (in most popular formats) and produce an Excel (or csv) file
with data that can be used to create excel chart that looks like the
picture.
A good answer to my question would be an information about such a
tool, with limits of its use, with links to places where such tools
are available (both free and paid sources).

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 02 Aug 2006 04:59 PDT

Give this software a try (you can try it at no charge):


http://zeus.df.ufcg.edu.br/labfit/index_xyExtract.htm


and let me know if it does the trick.  If it doesn't, what other
capabilities do you need?

pafalafa-ga

I am not aware of a tool that can do that in one-click operation
accurately. However, you can buy an Optical Character Recognition(OCR)
software. An OCR tool searches for text (albhabet, numbers etc.) in an
image (gif, jpeg etc.) and puts them in a generated text file. However
the process of converting the generated text file to CSV will have to
be good, old-fashioned way, manually.

Link on what/how of OCR
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/apps/story/0,10801,73023,00.htm://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=optical+character+recognition+software&btnG=Google+Search\
://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=optical+character+recognition+software&btnG=Google+Search
--
A few other souls looking for the meaning of life:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&q=optical+character+recognition+software+csv&qt_s=Search
--
A few software tools:
(some are free, some have trial versions, others you have to pay for
or download from a piracy website)
http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-20&qt=ocr&tag=srch
http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-2001&qt=optical%20character%20recognition&tag=srch
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=optical+character+recognition+software&hl=en&btnG=Search
--

You can be interested following software:
http://www.nuceng.com/Digitizepro.htm
http://www.datatrendsoftware.com/
http://www.unige.ch/sciences/chifi/cpb/windig.html
or
http://nick-gd.chat.ru/digiter_e.htm

more but old software you can find on:
http://nick-r.pisem.net/reference2.htm