| Optical character recognition, or 'OCR', is a | | | | lack of information contained in the cursive |
| technology that allows digital images of typed or | | | | characters. |
| handwritten text to be transferred into an | | | | Like I said, optical character recognition is |
| editable text document. For example, if you | | | | becoming increasingly popular. It is becoming |
| hooked up a scanner to your computer and used | | | | popular in areas of work that require massive |
| the scanner to scan a handwritten essay into a | | | | amounts of printed documents to be sorted. One |
| digital photo, you could take that digital photo and | | | | example of these areas is in the legal profession. |
| use optical character recognition software to | | | | Optical character recognition greatly reduces the |
| "see" and "grab" the text from the digital photo | | | | time required for these printed documents to be |
| so you can edit that text on your computer in a | | | | sorted. The time reduced can amount to days! |
| program like Microsoft Word, Notepad, or | | | | The United States Post Office has also been using |
| TextEdit. | | | | optical character recognition since 1965. |
| For the more "geeky" readers, optical character | | | | For a normal computer user who wants to be |
| recognition takes the picture of text and | | | | able to edit scanned documents of text, there |
| translates the text into Unicode or ASCII. From | | | | are many different types of software solutions |
| wikipedia.org, "unicode is an industry standard | | | | available. Different software solutions will allow |
| designed to allow text and symbols from all of | | | | both scanned handwritten and typed text to be |
| the writing systems of the world to be | | | | translated, while some may only allow scanned |
| consistently represented and manipulated by | | | | typed text to be translated. There are a couple |
| computers". Also from wikipedia.org, "ASCII | | | | optical character recognition programs that are |
| (American Standard Code for Information | | | | available for free. |
| Interchange) is a character encoding based on the | | | | Some free ones are: |
| English alphabet." Basically, optical character | | | | - SimpleOCR: |
| recognition technologies outputs text that is | | | | - OCRAD: |
| recognized by computers. | | | | If you are looking to spend money on an optical |
| Optical character recognition technologies can be | | | | character recognition program, expect to cough |
| found used in different software solutions, but | | | | up some cash. These OCR programs are in the |
| software is considered a low budget way to use | | | | area of $100. The following is a list of some of |
| optical character recognition technology. In more | | | | these programs: |
| complex optical character recognition systems, it | | | | - |
| is usual that a combination of both hardware and | | | | - |
| software will be used. | | | | - |
| While optical character recognition technology has | | | | Check out the websites to see what software |
| become increasingly popular and research for it | | | | solution will work best for you. Many of these |
| has intensified, the rates of text recognition are | | | | programs allow you to try them for a short trial |
| variable. For handwritten optical character | | | | period. It is definitely worth to check out as it |
| recognition, the rate of recognition is 80% to | | | | allows you to further explore optical character |
| 90% with clean handwriting. For cursive text, the | | | | recognition technology. |
| rate of recognition is quite lower because of the | | | | |