Making "editable text"___OCR and pdf converters
There will be times when you wish to make a quote that will be longer than just a few words. (Although you should always keep in mind that long quotes are not too desirable, instead you should be integrating the author's words into your own text flow and only quoting a snippet from it). But again, even when you do this, you may find that re-writing what the author wrote is easier if you can base your writing on their original text rather than doing it from scratch. For this you will need editable text. If you are reading a book or any kind of hard copy publication you will need an OCR system that undertakes the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
There are highly evolved and very expensive OCR applications such as the Abby Fine Reader, however for your purposes a basic online conversion tool should do the trick. The first step is scanning the page on which the text you want to use is. Make sure that, when you scan (or subsequently crop) your image, the sentences are perfectly parallel to the top and bottom borders of the resultant file. Also make sure that the text and the background are well contrasted. (You can use the "levels" in photoshop to do this). Saving this in a gif format works best since gif eliminates a lot of the grey tones that may get in the way of the crisp output that the OCR system needs to work properly. Then go here: http://www.onlineocr.net/default.aspx. You do not need to register to use this. Simply browse to the saved image of the page on your hard drive, upload and then convert after you fill out the captcha (in this case a row of numbers). There is a limit on how many pages you can convert - 15 per hour if I remember correctly. Again, should be more than enough for most needs...
A similar problem also happens with pdf files. With most of these you can copy the text, however what you paste will be fragmented according to the line configuration of the pdf file. No big deal maybe, you can always pull the lines back up by hand, however this takes time. So, a good way to get around this is to convert the entire pdf file into an Office Word file. There are a lot of conversion tools to do this, however the good ones usually cost quite a bit of money and the free ones usually end up massacring the text. The one that I found that is free and does a wonderful job is the Nuance pdf reader which you can download and install from here. Open your pdf file with the Nuance reader, then click on the button at the top that says "convert pdf." This will take you to a web page where you enter your email address and a password. The file gets uploaded to their server, converted and a download link gets sent back to you! Easy peasy!
Note: The Nuance pdf reader is for Windows only. Being a hardcore PC user, I have not tested it myself but for Mac you can try Doxillion which seems to be getting very good reviews (although there is a small fee attached to it), and the Mac App store also seems to have a free pdf to word converter which you can get from here.