Convert PDF files to Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, XML, SQL Databases and other formats. Scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and data validation tools for any size project or budget.

Total Cost of Ownership of an OCR Software

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting. (Wikipedia).

TCO is a popular concept when it comes to comparing Software. It allows you to estimate the cost of using the OCR software and plan your automation strategy according to your possible workload and budget over time.

There are several aspects that are too circumstantial to be able to include in general cost estimates, but there are some that we know for a fact, and we can combine them in a total cost of ownership for each OCR scenario and compare them to the possible solutions on the market.

Front-End Cost

The first and most obvious element is front-end cost. This is the price that will be presented with the product, and the marketing team will be pointing towards special offers and discounts to cut it down. It is an important factor, but it is far from everything you would need to take into account. And yet, even here, there are different options. Some of the OCR solutions will offer you the “pay and forget” option of making one payment right here, right now. However, lately, the annual cost or subscription model has become more and more popular, allowing customers to spread costs over time and OCR creators to organize a steady flow of income.

Cost of Support and Maintenance

The second element of the total cost of ownership would be the cost of support and maintenance. Theoretically, it is possible to avoid […]

OCR Guide

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

80%

Using the OCR software enables enterprises to reduce the document processing time by as much as 80%

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

What Document Management Systems are supported by PowerPDF Advanced 2.1?

Q: What Document Management Systems are supported by PowerPDF Advanced 2.1?

A: Document Management System support in the Advanced Edition

  • Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)  3.0 and Microsoft Office 365
  • eDOCS DM (former Hummingbird Enterprise™ 5.3.1 and 10

Power PDF supports eDOCS systems  if a DM Extensions API is installed and configured on the client machine. The product is also integrated into Windows Explorer DM Extension.

  • Interwoven® WorkSite 8.3, 8.5 and 9.3

Power PDF supports Interwoven WorkSite systems if DeskSite 8.2 or FileSite 8.2  for WorkSite 8.3 or FileSite 8.5 for WorkSite 8.5 or DeskSite 9.3 or FileSite 9.3 for Work 9.2 is installed and configured on the client machine. The product is also integrated into DeskSite and FileSite clients. The Nuance implementation warns if a requested document is checked out to another user.

  • Livelink® ECM – Enterprise Server 9.7.0 and 10 from OpenText Corp.

Power PDF supports LiveLink ECM if a LiveLink Explorer Professional Windows Client is installed and configured on the client machine.

  • OpenText Enterprise Connect

Supports OpenText Content Server through Enterprise Connect if the  Enterprise Connect framework 10.5 or higher is installed and configured on the machine

  • NetDocuments SaaS cloud-based storage.

Save files to this web-based storage facility, providing Software as a Service (SaaS).

  • Worldox® GX3 and GX4
  • EMC2® Documentum 7.1,  6.7

Power PDF supports EMC2 Documentum if a DFC 6.5 client is installed and configured on the client machine.

  • Xerox DocuShare 6 and 6.5
  • OnBase 13+

To work with Hyland’s OnBase from Power PDF the Nuance module must be licensed on the OnBase server.

DMS PowerPDF Document Management Systems

How to have more control over the OCR process in PowerPDF

Q: How to have more control over the OCR process in PowerPDF?  For example, to edit the text in the OCR layer to correct mistakes.

A: As designed, Nuance PowerPDF does not offer this functionality .

Nuance Power PDF program offers a powerful built-in OCR engine but it only offers limited control over the OCR process.  To accomplish what the client is requesting you would specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program such as Nuance® OmniPage®.

There are many advantages in using this Nuance® OmniPage® Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program if you want more control over the OCR process.

  • Choose from four formatting levels instead of two (see below)
  • Win full control over the OCR process, including:
    • The ability to manually zone pages
    • Access to multi-lingual spell checking and proofing
    • Dynamic verifier image display to speed up editing
    • Voice readback facility
    • And much more.
  • Scan new pages into the converted document
  • Add new pages from fax, image files or digital cameras
  • Save to other formats, including OmniPage’s internal format for document sharing with other OmniPage users.

The four formatting levels offered for saving in OmniPage are:

The pages retain the layout of the originals. Graphics and framed elements are placed in text boxes. Whenever possible, other text is transferred without using text boxes. Power PDF offers this under the name Flowing Column.

The pages retain the layout of the originals, but all elements are placed in text boxes, including text in columns. Power PDF offers this formatting.

Text is decolumnized, but text attributes, graphics and tables are retained.

  1. Flowing Page
  2. True Page
  3. Formatted Text
  4. Plain Text

Text is decolumnized and rendered as plain text. Graphics and tables are retained, but not in their original locations. This option is convenient for users who want to reformat the content.

 

Configuring Nuance PDF output settings to include more than 500 pages per PDF

By default when using the Nuance Full-Text step each PDF that is generated can only contain 500 pages. The following steps can be used to increase the maximum number of pages that each PDF can hold beyond 500 pages.

By default the Nuance full-text step is designed to create 500 page PDF’s. Use the following steps to increase the default number:

This change should be made on all Capture Automation servers that will be generating PDF’s.

  1. Make a copy of the ClientSettings.xml file located at C:\Program Data\Digitech Systems
  2. From the desktop, click Start > Run > type services.msc and press <Enter>
  3. Highlight and right-click the PaperVision ProcessInitiator1 service and choose Stop
  4. Edit the ClientSettings.xml file using Notepad
  5. Add the following line of text:<OCRFullTextMaxPagePerDoc>500</OCRFullTextMaxPagePerDoc>
  6. Change the value from “500” to the number of pages that will be used to create each PDF (e.g. 750)
  7. Save and close the ClientSettings.xml file
  8. From the desktop, click Start > Run > type services.msc and press <Enter>
  9. Highlight and right-click the PaperVision ProcessInitiator1 service and choose Start

PDF Processing with FineReader and FineReader Server

How to create a PDF from Microsoft® Word, Excel, or PowerPoint

 

How to convert emails to PDF

 

How to Split a PDF

Create new PDF documents or separate PDF documents combined in one easily with FineReader PDF 15.

Learn how to split PDFs and extract pages easily.

 

 

How to create and edit interactive PDF forms

Watch this video and see how to edit and create interactive PDF forms quickly and easily.

Form Editor tool in FineReader PDF 15 allows creating and editing fillable PDF forms with text and date fields, dropdown lists, list boxes, checkmarks, radio buttons, signature fileds and action buttons. Collect information and create effective document templates with ease!

 

How to extract text from scanned PDFs

 

 

How to extract tables

 

 

How can I verify if the digital signature is valid?

If you open a document with a valid digital signature in FineReader, you will see a green notification Valid on the left panel of ABBYY FineReader PDF 15:
 mceclip0.png

Recognizing a document with existing text layer in FineReader PDF 15

  1. Open FineReader PDF 15;
  2. Go to Tools > Options > OCR;
  3. In the PDF recognition mode select Use OCR option:
  4.  Click OK;
  5.  Recognize your document again.

 

 

How to convert a document into an accessible PDF/UA

Make your mixed documents—PDF, scanned, photographed, or papers— digital and accessible.

In this […]

ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK

ABBYY® Cloud OCR SDK is a web-based document processing service that will enhance your enterprise software systems, SaaS platforms, or your mobile apps with the ability to convert documents and utilize textual information from scans, PDFs, document images, smartphone photos, or screenshots.

Combining ABBYY’s latest AI-based technologies for information extraction with the highly scalable processing power of the Microsoft® Azure® computing infrastructure, this secure and reliable ABBYY cloud service can be easily integrated into your application via a REST API—empowering it to precisely convert virtually any number of pages within the shortest amount of time.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server On-Premise

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server turns OmniPage into a true server-based OCR solution that is scalable to any volume by load-balancing across multiple servers. OmniPage Server is perfect for high-volume conversion projects or for distributing OCR throughout the enterprise.

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1M PPY

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1 million pages per year – ABBYY FineReader OCR Server, Accusoft Barcode Engine 1D/2D Client, DTK Barcode Engine 1D/2D Server & ISIS Scanning

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money.  It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money.  It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation version
Includes:

basic text and barcode recognition,
ABBYY FineReader OCR Client,
TWAIN and ISIS scanning
1 Year Support & Upgrades

OCR Data Capture

What is OCR Data Capture?

document OCR process automationOCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

Enterprise data capture systems provide interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Who can benefit from OCR data capture software?

messy business information made easy with ocr data captureAny organization that collects data from paper documents, or electronic files like PDF and Office documents, can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with OCR data capture software.

You do need to have a significant number of documents to […]

Why are the prices of OCR applications so different?

OCR software ranges in price from freeware all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars. What explains the difference between these applications? Here’s the breakdown:

  • OCR Freeware uses the SimpleOCR or Tesseract engines and provide limited scanning and output format capabilities. Recognition quality is generally poor except for the highest quality document images.
  • PDF OCR Converters provide good quality OCR engines like ABBYY, IRIS and OmniPage, but limit the output to searchable PDF files. These cost less than $100.
  • Standard OCR applications range from $100-$200 and provide full OCR capabilities including converting scans to Word, Excel, HTML and other editable formats.
  • Corporate OCR applications add advanced features like automated hotfolder processing, concurrent licensing and other features useful for business applications. Pricing for these is $200-$500.
  • OCR Servers provide scalable, enterprise OCR services for processing very high volumes of documents or providing OCR capabilities to users throughout the organization. Prices start around $1,500 and go up based on processing volume.
  • Enterprise Data Capture and Forms Processing applications are used to capture structured data from complex documents like healthcare claim forms and invoices that include things like tables, handwriting, checkboxes, and movable zones. These solutions can cost anywhere from around $1,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the document volume and complexity of the project.

Using OCR to capture data from tables and reports

Data that repeats over and over again in a document can be OCR’d to Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and other spreadsheet formats, or a SQL Database like Access, SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle.

Inexpensive Desktop OCR products like FineReader, ReadIRIS and OmniPage can automatically convert data from tables to Excel and other spreadsheets, as long as the columns are standard and don’t “overlap” such that different field values appear in the same column area, like when one row of each record represents one set of columns and a second row has additional column data.

Converted data will require some clean-up before it is usable in any database or software application, and it is difficult to convert large numbers of documents in batches this way. But it’s a good way to produce structured data from large single reports or small batches of similar report data.

For more complex tables, tables with similar data but different formats on different documents (like Invoices), tables with nested structure like header and detail rows, Enterprise Forms Processing software is required to turn these documents into structured data like XML, JSON or SQL database tables.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Ultimate

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has several unique features that make it stand out for a variety of applications. Some of these include auto-redaction, SharePoint integration, automatic filing with barcodes, PDF auto-bookmarking, form data collection and MFP support. Most of these new features are not available in the Standard edition.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Standard

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Standard converts paper, picture, and PDF files into editable documents to save you considerable time and money by eliminating retyping. Your documents look just like the original – complete with text, tables, and graphics. OmniPage uses superior character accuracy to precisely format your documents so you can easily make changes.

OCR to Database

Data is Everything. It does not matter in what field your company works, after all everything will be distilled into digits of data and accumulated in Database to be processed, stored, repurposed and reassembled again, again and again.  All organizations have database, that acts as a repository for all of their information. And you may survive with manual data entry, or using spreadsheets or just folders with documents for some time, but eventually just mare amount of Data will become overwhelming.

Luckily there are plenty of solutions for your Database. You can choose between SQL (MySQL, Access, Postgres, …) or NoSQL (Mongo, AWS, …) solutions for storing and processing Data, but there will be always an issue of how raw unprocessed digits get from images or texts into more structured form of your Database. Identifying and transferring all of this data can be a bit of a task. Misreading data or mismatching of data to fields could easily ruin your data processing system. Thus, precision of data character recognition becomes essential.

One of the solutions is to keep these processes of scanning and data transferring separate. You can use one software for character recognition and transferring data from image to PDF or text document. And then to use PDF (or text) to database converters to extract that data into your database format. The very obvious disadvantage of this approach is that it adds the whole extra step into your data processing. You will start accumulate additional errors, will add time for setting up additional conversion, will add time to data processing and will add time for inevitable error identifying and bug fixing. It may work for smaller companies, but on larger enterprise level it becomes cost prohibitive.

Another solution is OCR to Database direct approach. […]

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

Innovative server-based OCR software for performing centralized enterprise-wide OCR processing. Allows anyone on the network to submit files for OCR. Complex XML job specifications can be submitted to control output. Support available for Arabic and Asian languages.

 

Available in CPU, Total Page Count and Pages Per Year licensing models.

 

Simple Software

SimpleIndex can bring speed and efficiency to your scanning or doc filing no matter the process. Even if all you are doing is hand keying a few basic details about a document, breaking those details into individual indexes and adding tools like drop down choice lists, automatic orientation, and blank page deletion ensure a smoother, more consistent process.

Automation

Here’s where things start to get interesting. From basic tasks like splitting individual documents within at stack of pages by spotting a blank page, a specific mark, or a barcode separator to capturing index data directly from the page or looking up additional details about a document in a database, SimpleIndex has a host of powerful tools to tame your piles of paper or drives full of digital files. Let’s look at a few.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition is the ability to take a scan, which is merely a picture of a page, and turn it into words that the computer can understand and use to index your files. SimpleIndex leverages the power of ABBYY FineReader, recognized as one of the best OCR engines on the market, to accurately capture names, dates, important numbers, document types, and other details about your file. Some products have you set a box and capture whatever information happens to fall in that zone. SimpleIndex takes it further with Dynamic Zone OCR to enable you to set an oversized zone that allows for shifting of the pages between scans, but still captures just the date you need by matching against templates, lists, or even Regular Expressions (RegEx). You can also skip the zones entirely and use the full text of a page to find matches for your index data.

Barcodes

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, (1 Year Subscription) is an all-in-one business toolset for working with PDFs and document digitization. With FineReader PDF employees can work with both digitally created and scanned paper documents to fulfill various document-related tasks in the digital workplace effortlessly. ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate allows you to view, edit, search, comment and collaborate, sign and protect PDFs or compare document versions in different file formats to identify differences efficiently. Thanks to the seamlessly integrated AI-based OCR technology with FineReader you can also extract information from a PDF or convert the entire document to Word, Excel® for further editing. Document conversion can also be automated to prepare multiple documents for further processing.

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, (1 Year Subscription) is a PDF software application for working with PDF documents and scans. Powered by ABBYY’s AI-based OCR technology it allows you to convert and edit not only digital PDF documents, but also scanned paper documents with the same ease-of-use. With FineReader PDF you can view, edit, search, comment, sign, protect, extract text from PDFs and convert documents into Word, Excel® for further editing.

 

SimpleOCR | OCR Software Experts

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Document Scanners
& Scanner Parts

Accurate OCR starts with quality images. Efficient OCR starts with fast scanning. Find Document Scanners built for OCR at ScanStore.

Our Team of OCR experts is here to help! SimpleOCR is not just Freeware, we have every kind of OCR solution from PDF Converters to Enterprise Data Capture, OCR Servers and Handprint Recognition for Forms and Surveys. Live chat with an OCR specialist now or Contact Us for a consultation on your OCR project.

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR Software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications.

SimpleIndex is OCR built for business, offering powerful batch scanning, OCR server, and data capture features with a simple user interface and affordable licensing.

If you like free stuff, freeware versions of our SimpleView Document Viewer (with Tesseract OCR), SimpleCoversheet Bar Code Printer, and SimpleExport CSV to XML Converter are also available.

If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users.

If your documents have multi-column layouts, non-standard fonts, tables, poor quality or digital camera images, you will not have much success with applications based on free and open source engines like SimpleOCR and Tesseract. You will need a commercial OCR application to get an accurate read. Our OCR Guide compares desktop and server […]

Forms Processing

What is ICR, Survey & Forms Processing?

ICR stands for Intelligent Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret hand printed text on scanned images.

Data Capture Forms OCRForms Processing Software uses ICR technology to automate data entry tasks involving hand-filled surveys, applications and forms. It provides interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Forms Processing also includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize machine printed text, and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) for check boxes and multiple choice bubbles.

It is also possible to use these applications to automate data collection from PDF forms, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other formats used to fill out forms electronically. Many include the ability to publish forms as paper, fillable PDF and web pages simultaneously to distribute and collect data from multiple sources into one dataset.

Who can benefit from forms processing software?

Any organization that collects data on paper-based forms, surveys or applications on a regular basis can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with forms processing software.

You do need to have a significant number of forms to justify the expense– at least a hundred forms per month or more depending on how much data is being captured. If the data entry task can be done in under 100 man-hours then it is not a good candidate for automation with ICR software.

Organizations that have many separate departments that collect data on forms can share the budget for forms processing software by re-using it for other projects. Your current project may not be big enough to justify the expense, but when combined with one or two others it would be.

How much do […]

Convert Scanned Image to Text Document

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.

OCR Software comes in many different types, which vary in price range based on their features, speed, and accuracy. One of the main qualities that OCR producers are using to differentiate their products is volume of the documents OCR will allow you to process. That may be a bit counter intuitive but features that are needed to process hundreds, thousands or millions pages a year are rather different ones.

In case of several hundreds of pages (receipts, checks, medical, tax or legal forms, personal memorabilia)  you need to scan for personal use you would need light, highly versatile, easy to use, not expensive software that will convert images just to text. It may not have automation features, and processing data further will be done manually by you. Thou it is not too hard since volume of documents is not very large and you can treat each of them individually.

Small business users usually process thousands of pages a year and require some automation features. Images need to be converted not just to text, but also to spreadsheets to be processed further. Once the system is set up it is assumed that it will run without much of the interference, and people in charge of document processing would be able to do that with certain ease.

Larger companies processing millions of documents require much larger levels of automation when each small, fine tuned feature would save thousands of work hours in a long run. Multiple machines will be processing documents […]

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