Page 8 - May_Newsletter_2017
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Common solutions
• Most scanner manufacturers now include
Optical Character Recognition software
• Will turn scan into editable document for
Word etc
• Can change resolution to reduce file size
• Image “cleanup” option
A scanner produces and image of the original scanned item, which in a
lot of cases is fine. However, if this is a document and it is necessary to
edit it after the scan, then this may become a problem. Optical Character
Recognition software or OCR was developed
The primary purpose of Optical Character Recognition is to quickly and
automatically convert scanned images of machine-printed (typed) text -
which to a computer are no more meaningful a collection of pixels than
any other image, such as a landscape photo - into actual text data that
you can search through and modify. The exact mechanics of this process
are complicated, but suffice to say that an OCR engine will look at pixel
data and search for patterns resembling letters, numbers, and other sym-
bols and create a digitized record of these symbols.

