Patent ID: 8213748

Claim:
An image processing apparatus comprising: an image acceptance unit that accepts an image; a character information adding unit that adds, via a processor, character information to the image accepted by the image acceptance unit, including: (i) a character code for uniquely identifying a character, (ii) a character position indicating a position of the character in the image, (iii) a character size indicating a size of the character, and (iv) a character color indicating a color of the character; a font allocation unit that allocates font information without a drawing element as a font corresponding to the character code within the character information added by the character information adding unit; and an electronic document generation unit that generates an electronic document for reference to the font information allocated by the font allocation unit, based on the character information added to the image by the character information adding unit, wherein when text information of the character information of the electronic document is copied and pasted, the character code and the character color are acquired, and the font information is added to the image as transparent characters that contain at least one of the font information, the character code and the character color.