OCR : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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OCR: Optical Character Recognition. A scanner just creates an electronic picture of a page, composed of millions of electronic dots. You can’t edit this with a word processor. You need optical character recognition software to analyse the dots, and "see" patterns in them and convert the dots to text. Hewlett Packard bundles WordScan with its scanners. This software is worse than useless. If you fork over several hundred dollars more, you can upgrade to WordScan Plus which is, to be charitable, inadequate. I found TextBridge reasonably priced, and much faster and much more accurate. Before you buy a scanner or OCR software, try out the process on someone else’s computer. It is incredibly time consuming and just about the most boring thing a human can do.
scanner

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