OmniWare Pro 12 ScanSoft manual Introduction

Chapter 2

Introduction

You probably use your computer for business correspondence, preparing reports, handling data and an ever-increasing number of other uses. The challenge is that, in spite of the digital revolution, certain sources of information still circulate in printed, paper form and cannot be used immediately in a computer.

For example, if you want to incorporate information from a magazine article in a report you are preparing, you somehow have to get the text from the article into your computer. Painstakingly retyping the article is not an appealing solution.

This chapter introduces you to the solution: optical character recognition (OCR). It describes how OmniPage Pro 12 uses OCR technology to transform text from scanned pages or image files into editable text for use in your favorite computer applications.

We present the following topics:

XWhat is optical character recognition

•Documents in OmniPage Pro

•Basic processing steps

XThe OmniPage Desktop

XManaging documents

XOmniPage Documents

XSettings

OmniPage Pro User’s Guide 19