WHAT IS OCR AND DO I NEED IT?
Once your business chooses to avail scanning services and convert physical files and documents to digital, you’ll inevitably come across the term OCR. OCR or Optical Character Recognition, is the term for a broad range of technologies and software-based techniques that convert printed letters and words into digital letters and words. These capabilities enable OCR and are essential in making scanned documents “searchable.”
The process of scanning a page starts with taking a high-quality photograph of the original page. Applying OCR to the photo effectively codes the letters and the words on the scanned page so that these can be recognised by a computer the same way a computer can effectively “read” text that has been typed into a typical word document.
HOW OCR WORKS IN DOCUMENT SCANNING
OCR does this by matching the patterns on the page to known shapes such as letters, words, and punctuation marks. It’s important to note that OCR works more effectively on printed pages, as opposed to hand-written documents. The regular spacing and clear printing of printed text are easier for OCR to convert. Handwriting can be much more varied and the irregularity makes it difficult for the OCR software to identify the text.
After the OCR is completed, the converted page will have the features of a typical word document, instead of merely being a photo or image file of the page. The document can be spell-checked, indexed, and even word-searched.
Instead of manually looking through the entire document some of which can be made up of thousands of pages, users can harness the power of the computer to perform keyword searches. The resulting files can also be electronically archived.
CONVERT YOUR PHYSICAL DOCUMENTS TO SEARCHABLE FILES TODAY
If your business can benefit from having thousands of physical documents scanned and converted to searchable files, then you definitely need OCR. Contact Scan2Archive today to learn more about our document scanning and OCR services for your company’s needs.
