Optical Characters is a technology that lets you convert different type of documents, such as a scanned printer documents, PDF files or images captured/taken by digital camera into editable and searchable. It is widely used for passports, bank statements, invoices, business cards, computerised receipt.
Advantages
- Cheaper than paying someone or a business to pay to manually enter large amounts of text for you.
- It’s generally faster than someone else manually entering all of the text.
- The latest software of Optical Character Reader can recreate tables and original layout.
Disadvantages
- Not 100% accurate, there are likely to be some mistakes made during the process.
- All documents need to be checked over carefully and then manually corrected.
- If the original documents is of poor quality or the handwriting may be difficult to read, more mistakes will occur.
- Not worth doing it for small amounts of text.
Alternatives
The alternatives to an OCR or Optical Character Reader you can use your hand and hand write all of the text out, this will leave not as much mistakes as the actual software. People will usually use OCR if they have a lot of information to copy out, if not they will usually hand write it out.