

Why Document OCR?
Online Document OCR or optical character recognition is the technology used to distinguish printed or handwritten text within digital images of physical documents. Image to text is most commonly used to turn hardcopy, legal or historic documents into PDFs or text.

How OCR Work?
An Online OCR system analyzes an image and identifies dark areas as characters that need to be recognized, enabling digital archiving, editing, and documents searching with common programs like Free Document OCR. Characters are recognized with one of two algorithms.

Pattern Recognition
Document OCR programs are fed examples of texts and various fonts and formats to compare and recognize characters in a text document.
Free OCR can also convert file such as PDF to word and images to text

Feature Detection
OCR online programs apply rules about letters and numbers of features, like lines, curves angles in order to recognize characters. For instance, the letter A might be recognized as two diagonal lines connected by a horizontal line across the middle.

Uses of online OCR
Online Document OCR is also used for archiving newspapers and phone books, mobile app check deposits, automated toll booth collection, indexing print materials for search engines, managing legal documents, sorting mail, and digitizing documents to be read aloud for the visually impaired.
Before online OCR technology Paper documents could only be converted manually with someone typing documents one by one. Free OCR saves a huge amount of time, reduces translation errors, and minimizes effort for converting image to text.