Randy,
You are looking for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. OCR processes images and finds the text. Then you use that text and paste it into your favorite text editor.
OCR is not cheap, but read Jon Galloway's article
Free OCR software? You may already have it. which describes a Microsoft Office OCR utility that converts scanned TIFF images to Word documents.
Good article and the MS Office OCR is surprisingly good.
Skip the first bits on GOCR and Tesseract.