Tiff extraction question

[Eliott]

Dear Jackrabbit users!

during the final phase of a project came into my attention that tiff 
files are also capable of storing the image and the ocr-ed text in a 
same file, just like PDFs do. Since we have many of such files, we have 
a business need to extract text from these tiffs.

Has anybody written a text extractor or knows a library that can get the 
text layer from these files? Is there any specific reason why JR does 
not support this out of the box?

regards
eliott