seeking image to doc converter

OCR software (Optical Character Recognition) does not deal with handwritten notes very well. The best I have come across so far is a software called Evernote (which is not free) and Microsoft's own One Note (which is often bundled with PCs but otherwise you may have to pay for as part of the Student and Home Use Office Suite (which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint). With these two you would simply import your .gif as a 'note' and then there are fairly good tools which recognise text in an image. Whether it will actually extract the text as a document is another matter (and how accurately it will do it is another matter still!) If your handwritten document is not in English, you may have severe difficulties!

Often, the best and quickest solution is the most basic and obvious: dictate the text to a good typist (or use voice recognition software, which is bundled free with Vista or available from Dragon Naturally Speaking, to dictate the text to the computer yourself). Probably the easiest way would be to find someone who would type to your dictation. Voice Recognition software takes some training (both of the user and the software) and you might find that it was so frustrating as to be unworkable.