extracting text from tiff files from jackrabbit

[Eliott]

Dear  Users!

We are using tika indirectly for a project based on jackrabbit. during 
the final phase of this 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 to be able to do full 
text searches. As I understand tikka does not support this functionality 
in case of tiffs, while pdfs do work ok.  Is there any special reason 
for this?

Has anybody written a text extractor or knows a library that can get the 
text layer from these files?

thanks in advance
eliott