Expert: Scottgem - 2/29/2008

Question
QUESTION: Hi Scottgem:

Before I begin, do you have any knowledge of OCR software? Thanks.

ANSWER: Some, what do you need?

Scott<>

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: OK, thanks Scott. This is a general question about OCRs. I have a form that contains 3 horizontal lines that separates information into 4 sections. I want to edit the information and reprint so that the form looks EXACTLY the same but now with the edited info displayed. I am using OmniPage SE and I have scanned the document into the program. There are 2 windows displayed. 1 shows the actual scan which looks like the original but is non editable. Once I pressed the OCR button the 2nd window shows the information loaded into a Word document which I can edit but the 3 horizontal lines are not showing. In general, should I be able the accomplish my goal of retaining the formatting when I reprint? The online manual that comes with the software is not clear on this issue. Thanks in advance, Scott.

Answer
I wouldn't use OmniPage for this. OCR works well with plain text documents, but when you have heavily formatted documents like forms, the elements aren't going to come through well.

What I would suggest is using either OmniForm (a sister product to OmniPage also from Nuance) or the FormTyper mosule from Paperport (another Nuance product). Both allow you to scan forms that will recognize and apply fillable fields in a layer on top of the scanned image, then print them together.

Hope this helps
Scott<>