i want to read text from image file

Hi,

You need some sort of character recognition code. Try searching on here for an article or Google for 'Character Recognition' 'Optical Character Recognition' or 'OCR' code.

Hope that helps. :)

Um ... load the image into Paint, or some other image-processing program, and look at the picture on the screen? :-\

No, of course, that's not the answer you're looking for.

What you need is some OCR - optical character recognition software. I recommend Googling for 3rd party software that will do the job - it'll be far more reliable than attempting to write your own. Many, many years of research have going into the creation of effective OCR, so unless you want to do it for the sake of learning how it's done, there's absolutely no sense in doing it yourself.

If you really must do it yourself, think about the task: are you wanting to recognize handwriting or print? If print, what font(s)? If handwriting, are you interested in cursive (joined letters) or block printing? What about different font weights? (Bold font lines are typically many pixels wider than normal fonts). Do you want to insist that the text is on a plain background, or are you interested in handling noise (such as may be present in a fax, or photograph of something with writing on it)?