You can select an image in the document and copy it, then paste into OneNote. In OneNote, right-click on the image and choose Copy Text from Picture.

Then, in another part of the OneNote page or in a Word document, paste the result. Depending on the quality of the image, you may have to do some cleanup, and if the text in the image is highly formatted (columns, tables, etc.), the result may well be disappointing. Here's the result from the above image:

Word Online have limited capabilities. These limitations apply to text boxes and many other features that are only available in the full product.

If you open your online documents in the full, locally installed version of Word, then can you edit these documents?

This is not an answer although I hope it will grow into a community answer. At the moment it is an exploration of what is required to solve the problem.

I know from the discussion when this question was posted on Super User that Abdullah wishes to publish his book on Kindle. So the question is really about how to get a document in English and Arabic ready for publication as an e-Book.

The Kindle does not support Arabic. The number of languages it does support is slowly increasing but there is no evidence I can find that Amazon has plans to add Arabic in the foreseeable future.

The format behind an Amazon e-Book is a cut down version of HTML. If a Word document containing Arabic letters is exported to HTML, the Arabic letters are included as character entities; for example: “ﭐ &#amp;64337; ﭒ ﭓ”. Importing the original Word or the HTML version to Kindle, results in the leading bits being discarded so these characters are displayed as P, Q, R and S instead of “ﭐ ﭑ ﭒ ﭓ (Alef Wasla isolated form, Alef Wasla final form, Beeh Wasla isolated form and Beeh Wasla final form).

I have tried Abdullah’s idea of saving some Arabic letters in a PNG file and creating an HTML file containing <p> … </p> <img src= “Arabic.png” > <p> … </p>. The appearance of this file on my Kindle 2 is perfectly acceptable so this has the potential to be a solution. The question is: how can the necessary conversions be performed?

We need to extract each Arabic string from either the Word document or its HTML equivalent and import it into a program that can convert them to PNG files.

The only way that I know of automating this would be to copy each string to a slide within PowerPoint. With PowerPoint’s SaveAs option it is possible to save each slide as a separate PNG file. The slides are named: SLIDE1.PNG, SLIDE2.PNG, SLIDE3.PNG and so on in sequence which would allow a macro to relate the results to the original strings. It would then be possible to replace the Arabic strings in the HTML file with the image elements. None of this would be too difficult to automate but there is a problem with the slides all being the size of the PowerPoint page. The page could be made smallish but what we need is for each slide to be cropped to just bigger than that slide’s text. I cannot think of any way of automating this cropping.

Does anyone have a better approach than converting each Arabic phrase to a PNG file?

I have been looking for PNG editors with some sort of command line interface but can find nothing that would be easier than using PowerPoint. Does anyone know of an alternative to PowerPoint?

Does anyone have any suggestions for automating the cropping of each image? When a string is placed in a PowerPoint slide it is possible to set its width to, say, 6.5cm (which looks good on my Kindle) and get the height determined by PowerPoint. This could be saved for later use if anyone knows how to use it.

Implementing solution

Pending any suggestions for improving the approach described above, the following outlines how I would implement it.

I would not attempt to process the Word document. I would save it as a Web Page, Filtered HTML file, which is a required step on the way to creating a Kindle eBook, and process that.

Within the HTML file created from my test document, the Arabic phrase comes out as:

<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span dir="RTL"
style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:Arial">
&amp;#64336;&amp;#64337;&amp;#64338;&amp;#64339;&amp;#64340;&amp;#64341;
&amp;#64342;&amp;#64343;&amp;#65153;&amp;#65154;&amp;#65276;&amp;#65275;
&amp;#65274;&amp;#65273;&amp;#65246;&amp;#65226;&amp;#65227;&amp;#65228;
</span><span style="font-size:24.0pt"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p>

I assume Abdullah's document will result in something similar. Note 1: the above is a random collection of Arabic letters. Note 2: they are held left-to-right in reading sequence even though, when displayed or printed, they are read right-to-left.

The whole of this block will have to be replaced with something like:

<br><imc src="xxxx.png"><br>

where the file xxxx.png holds an image of the Arabic text.

The file names, such as xxxx.png, could be systematic (A001.png, A002.png, ...) but I would have thought that transliterating the first ten or twenty characters of the phrase from the Arabic to English alphabets and using the result, with a numeric suffix, as the file name would be more convenient.

I would hold the records necessary to manage the process in an Excel worksheet. I would place the VBA code in the same workbook.

The steps in the conversion process that I envisage are:

1. VBA macro to extract Arabic strings from latest HTML file and add new strings to the Excel worksheet. (More about the Excel worksheet later.)
2. VBA macro to create PowerPoint file, with one slide per new string, and use SaveAs in PNG format to create one PNG file per slide before discarding the PowerPoint file.
3. Human to crop each PNG file. (There appears to be no way of automating the cropping so this task will be minimised by use of data in the Excel worksheet.)
4. VBA macro to rename each slide from SLIDEnnn.PNG to its permanent name and to record the permanent name in the Excel worksheet.
5. VBA macro to update the latest HTML file by replacing the block containing the Arabic phrase with the appropriate HTML IMG element.

The Excel worksheet needs two columns: Arabic phrase and PNG file name. If there is any risk of the worksheet being sorted between steps 2 and 4, we may need a sequence number as well.

Macro 1 will extract an Arabic phrase from the HTML file, look down the list in the worksheet for this phrase and add the phrase at the bottom if it is not already present.

Macro 2 will look for phrases in the worksheet that do not have a PNG file name. These new phrases are the ones to be written to the PowerPoint presentation. That is, a phrase only goes into this process once.

Task 3, cropping each PNG file, will be a pain. All I can say is that it will only be once per phrase.

Macro 4 will assume that the SLIDE001.PNG, SLIDE002.PNG, … are in the sequence of phrases without PNG files in the worksheet. If this might not be true (because the worksheet has been sorted) we will either need a sequence number or to retain the PowerPoint file. The macro will assign a unique name to each new phrase, record this name in the worksheet and rename the PNG file.

Macro 5 creates a new copy of the latest HTML file using the contents of the worksheet to determine which phrase to replace with which PNG file.

This process is not ideal but it will achieve the desired result and has no obvious complications. Any suggestions for improving it?