What is an OCR tool?

Digitizing print documents: OCR converts print documents into digitized documents that are editable and searchable. For optimum results, you need to improve the print quality of the document. Issues such as folds, dirty marks, coffee stains and ink blots can make a huge difference to the quality of the final output. The OCR tool can improve the print quality by photocopying the print document. Photocopying increases the contrast between the print and page, resulting in accurate character and word recognition.

Scanning: In the next step, the printout is run through the optical scanner. Sheet-fed scanners are better than flatbed scanners for OCR because they scan pages one after the other. Most OCR tools scan each page, recognize the words and characters on it and then move to the next page.

Two-color scans: The OCR tool generates black-and-white versions of the color or grayscale scanned page. If the scanned document is accurate, the OCR tool will recognize the black color as a character and white as the background. Converting the image into black and white is therefore the first stage of digitizing documents as it helps to identify what text needs to be processed.

OCR: All OCR tools generally work on the same principle, that is, they process the image by recognizing each character and then present the output word by word, and line by line in the form of recognized text.

Basic error correction: Some OCR tools have in-built spell checkers that scan for errors when a page is processed. The spell check highlights misspelled words indicating any misrecognition, allowing you to make corrections side by side. The more sophisticated tools can also conduct what is known as near-neighbor analysis. Basically, the feature can find words that are more likely to occur together, for instance, a baking bog will be automatically corrected to a barking dog given that these words are near neighbors and more likely to occur together. You can, if you wish, switch off the feature because sometimes automatic corrections could lead to an error.

Layout analysis: An OCR tool can also detect a complex page layout, for example, a print document with multiple images and tables. The tool will automatically convert images into graphics and split tables correctly, such that text from the first line of the first column doesn’t continue to the text on the first line of the second column.

Proofreading: While the OCR tool can do basic editing and proofreading, the best practice would be to have someone manually edit the document for errors.