Do you still keep paper records? Are you scanning those documents, or considering having those document scanned?
Regardless of whether your paper situation is fully under control (or if it’s gotten way out of hand) simply scanning documents with the nearest scanner isn’t all that helpful.
Instead, using a scanner that's integrated with OCR technology provides many benefits over traditional scanning.
The list goes on and on.
But OCR scanner software and intelligent document processing overcome these problems to securely store scanned documents in the location of your choosing.
Traditional document scanning is great for reproducing paper in PDF digital format, but it doesn’t solve your deeper problems (and sure doesn't help with formats like microform).
Traditional scanning does not make it easier to:
In fact, it adds complexity and risk of losing important information.
However, document scanning with OCR converter software is the safe and smart alternative to traditional document scanning as it solves all of these problems.
You could see the content just fine, and recognize the letters, but the content didn’t have any meaning to you. So when you scan documents without creating an awareness of the content, it’s the same thing.
Your information systems have no clue what’s there. And it makes sense.
There’s all kinds of different documents you work with. It's not thousands of copies of the same form.
How’s a computer to know what’s what?
Intelligent OCR processing software not only reads your documents, but understands the content and moves specific information into your information systems along with a human-readable PDF image.
It’s like going back in time and capturing everything in a software application instead of just on paper.
OCR scanner software is the singular solution to eliminate both fear of digitizing records and cost of manual data entry (because, let's face it - you could hand-key everything, but that is time-consuming, painstaking and can have errors).
In addition to OCR scanner software, document scanning services that use OCR software also exist to make document scanning even easier.
Additionally, your existing databases can also be used to validate known information like:
You choose how to integrate document data and where it goes. But the possibilities to improve your organization (and decrease costs / increase profits) are numerous:
Hopefully you can see why simply scanning documents with the nearest scanner is not the smart choice and why reading data from documents with OCR is a much better solution.
In addition, there are several elements that lead to superior OCR data recognition results. In this Guide to OCR, you can learn from document processing industry experts what leads to the best results in OCR scanning.
In the OCR Software Cheat Sheet, discover:
OCR software can recognize machine-created text or even handwritten text (by using intelligent character recognition).
That text is then extracted, processed and turned into machine-readable text that can be moved into, stored, and analyzed in other software, like content management systems or business intelligence software.
Suddenly, data that was once trapped on a page is now able to be found through searches or used to make important decisions.
The first step in getting OCR software to read like a human is converting documents to a machine-readable version. Humans understand the intent of a document just by looking at it.
Tables, cells, the structure of the document, and labels tell us everything we need to know. But software can’t read documents so easily.
Here's an example of how machines have trouble reading documents:
The best attempt so far at getting machines to read documents has been with OCR scanner software. And it doesn’t work all that great on paper documents. It tries to interpret everything on a document as a letter or number.
For example, the letter “I” is easily confused with a 1, or an l or L or an i. And when OCR sees lines or other non-text marks on a document, the results are ugly. You can’t trust this data or make business decision on it.
Check out this article which does a nice job showing real-life struggles on a simple receipt.
In order to create a machine-readable version of a document, everything must be removed that isn’t text.
Then, the important elements that make up the structure of the document must be added back in because they provide the context for how the software will interpret text on the page.
This part of the process is simple, as the software will:
And to do a really good job of reading the text, the machine will need to use multiple OCR tools (we call them engines). One OCR engine might be better with handwriting, while another is better at reading those odd fonts on checks.
This image is an example of a document that has different fonts (and even handwriting) on one page:
Now the software knows what’s on the page and the meaning of specific data elements like:
Your job is to tell the machine how you want to integrate the data within your information system(s). Easy!
Grooper OCR includes comprehensive image processing capabilities to help scans look as clear as possible for best possible text recognition results. A patented technology in Grooper is Layered OCR, which runs using multiple layers to derive the best total results which are combined in a final output.
A comprehensive globalized multi-language database is included. The language subsystem recognizes 268 distinct languages and 523 regional cultures.
Pros:
In addition to its many other document capabilities, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC features built-in OCR functionality. This aspect enables users to convert scanned documents into PDFs with editable electronic text very quickly or extract text from from PDF files.
Adobe also recognizes text in order to match fonts accurately when converting text into PDFs.
Pros:
Cons:
ABBYY FineReader PDF is an OCR solution that takes files from a scanner and converts them into a readable, organized digitized document. In addition to recognizing and converting text into electronic text in PDFs, Microsoft Office or other various formats, Abbyy can also compare documents in different formats, or add comments / annotations.
Pros:
Cons:
Readiris uses a very simple accessible interface with a lot of needed features to make for a good OCR scanner software option. It is a cost-effective option for small businesses with PDF, Pro, or Corporate-level packages.
In particular, Readiris empowers users to edit, convert and transform all paper document scans into your choice of digital format with just a few clicks. When it comes to PDFs, Readiris enables users to edit and annotate, aggregate and split PDFs, or sign and protect them.
It also supports other abilities that attach watermarks, annotations or comments inside documents.
Pros:
Cons:
OmniPage is meant for businesses who demand more out of their OCR, and includes more complicated features depending on which version you select. It is a more powerful OCR scanner software that can handle larger batches of business document OCR workflows.
After scanning, this software can convert your paper files, making them editable and searchable. With OmniPage, users can scan documents to any format and send them anywhere on the business's network.
Pros:
Cons:
Well...it's free for personal or commercial use. That's about everything good you can say about SimpleOCR. The interface is outdated, clunky and doesn't appear that it's been updated since version 3.1. It really only handles very basic text recognition well. Anything else is a struggle.
According to it's own website, it doesn't recognize handwritten text, though other sites claim SimpleOCR offers handwriting extraction only as a 14-day free trial. It uses a lexicon (word dictionary to recognize words) of over 120,000 words. If there is a word it does not recognize, you can add new words via the text editor. It also supports English and French language recognition.
As with any other scanner software, it works with all versions of Windows and needs only a TWAIN driver to be compatible with the scanner. The image retention feature is used to capture and retain images from documents instead of needing to import images individually.
Pros:
Cons: