OmniWare Pro 12 ScanSoft What is optical character recognition, OmniPage Pro’s OCR capabilities

What is optical character recognition

Optical character recognition is the process of extracting text from an image. This image can result from scanning a paper document or opening an electronic image file. Images do not have editable text characters; they have many tiny dots (pixels) that together form character shapes. These present a picture of the text on a page.

During OCR, OmniPage Pro 12 analyzes the character shapes in an image and defines solutions to produce editable text. After OCR, you can save the resulting text to a variety of word-processing, desktop publishing or spreadsheet applications.

OmniPage Pro’s OCR capabilities

In addition to text recognition, OmniPage Pro can retain the following elements of a document through the OCR process.

Graphics

Photos, logos, and drawings are examples of graphics.

Text formatting

Font types, sizes and styles (such as bold, italic and underlines) are examples of character formatting. Indents, tabs, margins and line spacing are examples of paragraph formatting.

Page formatting

Column structure, table formats, and placement of graphics and headings are examples of page formatting.

The graphics, text and page formatting elements that OmniPage Pro retains are determined by the settings you select. Refer to the Settings Guidelines in the online Help for more information about selecting settings.

OmniPage Pro only recognizes machine-generated characters such as offset or laser-printed or typewritten text. However, it can retain handwritten text, such as a signature, as a graphic.

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