Info-Mac

How can I take the text from a picture file so that I can copy and paste it or edit it in Word?

What you're seeking to do is typically considered not ideal. Flat picture files, like JPEG and PNG images, do not contain text data, rather the text is simply rasterized pixels just like the rest of the image. You would ideally want to get the text in it's original format.

That being said, you can try your luck with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. A free one available from Google can be found here. Make sure to take it with a grain of salt, it is particularly unreliable. Be sure to proofread anything created by an OCR program for spelling and grammar errors.

I just created a sample image to try out Google's online OCR thing. It sort of works, but there were more errors than I was expecting. A lot of drpped lettrs from wrds.

I've had good results with this program: http://stuporglue.org/tako/

My problem with the open-source OCR software for Unix (and thus, Mac OS X too) is that while they work, they take a lot of fiddling, and I don't have time for that at the moment.