The picture needs to go through a different process called Optical Character Recognition before it can be handled as text. It is totally different in terms of coding. A black and white picture is a bunch of dots, and each dot is on or off. So the code is just a huge stream of on-on-off-off-on-off type binary digits. Text is generated from ASCII code, with each character or number being represente din the file by an 8-bit number like "01000111" for example. So a text file is a series of 8-bit numbers and for each number the computer generates a character on the screen rather than interpreting the file one dot at a time.

So someone has to OCR the file to turn the bit-mapped picture of characters into the ASCII-coded text version.

Most modern scanners come equipped with OCR software, or did the last time I looked.

A