By Carissa Glenn


The dramatic shift in business from the mountains of paperwork in the past to the digital products of the present has been one of the most fundamental changes in business in over a century. It was immediately obvious that word processing allowed changes to be made instantly without the time consuming reproduction of entire pages. However, all the documents already created had to be reproduced by hand until the advent of HP Teleform OCR Software.

As the businesses became focused on information technology and the standard desktop included a computer, the time expended creating and correcting documents was drastically reduced, and most employees could produce their own without the added man-hours of an administrative assistant. Retrieving documents could be accomplished electronically through search functions and accomplished in seconds even with thousands of documents stored.

While the majority of office workers and businesses looked forward to the anticipated paper free environment, it was not to be. In the working environment, one of the most common and efficient means of getting information from consumers remains the use of a written form. Customers can fill them out a their leisure and in privacy, eliciting better responses.

In addressing this issue, software developers sought the means to automate functions which were being handled by people. The key elements to be addressed aside from the actual software coding were speed, accuracy and reliability. Interestingly, the first thing people worry about is whether a new system can be as good as the manual method, when they are often proven far more accurate than the process when handled exclusively by people.

The solution is the use of optical character recognition which scans a document and converts the characters to digital format. By preformatting the software, the individual fonts can be recognized by comparing scanned images with programmed ones, and non-character markings such as lines can be replicated. Pixel by pixel comparisons also assist in reproducing charts and identifying handwritten characters.

Using this type of advanced recognition programming, it is now possible to take printed documents and scan them, with the output a digital file. This is a complex process, as there are a number of difficulties to overcome. Stray marks from printers, handwritten annotations that are illegible and even dirt and debris must be excluded as much as possible.

Electronic filters in the form of algorithms could anticipate and remove the dots and marks faxes and copies often have, making the digital copy cleaner than the document itself. There was also a need to straighten any documents since putting the original on the copy machine is not always truly vertical. Once all the algorithms and anticipated characters lines and shapes are in place, the program is ready.

With the program finished, scanning documents can be accomplished faster than automated copying, and far ore efficiently than by hand. Once scanned and replicated, there is no cost to transmit them anywhere in as may copies as needed. HP Teleform OCR Software makes handling forms as easy as making a photocopy.




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