Fujifilm app can ‘word wrap’ text from photos (Video)

By Jeffrey Van Camp Published July 9, 2012

Fujifilm GT Layout Word wrapping — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’ve ever tried to read text or a Webpage on a smartphone, you usually have one big problem: the screen is too small. To solve this, many mobile Web browsers enlarge text for you. The best of them let you zoom in, and automatically re-wrap the words on the page so that they all fit on the screen. When this doesn’t happen, you have to scroll from side to side and up and down, which gets tiresome. With images, there has never been any hope to fix this problem, until now. Fujifilm has developed an app called ‘GT-Layout’ that lets you take a picture of a text-filled page, and then lets you zoom in to read it, automatically wrapping text as if you weren’t looking at a JPG picture.

The YouTube video below shows the Android app in action. We’re not sure how or if it could resize and restructure pages that have charts and graphs on them, but we hope to try it out. Technologies that can break apart and read text out of images could lead to a huge advance in digitization of written materials. The possibilities of technology like this are vast. Imagine being able to write notes, take a picture of them, and have them completely digitized and easy to read.

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(Thanks to DigInfo TV for the video and Engadget for the link)

Jeffrey Van Camp

Former Deputy Editor

As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…

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