Posted on Apr 11, 2018

In the modern office, there are a lot of processes and devices that make life easier. Some are obvious: card authentication, cloud backups, the break room coffee maker. But others are invisible by design. By design, they do the heavy lifting in the background so you don't have to worry about it. One of the greatest unsung heroes of invisible processes is optical character recognition, or OCR. What is optical character recognition? Optical character recognition, or OCR, is the process by which an image of printed text is electronically converted into a format that a computer can understand so that the text can later be indexed, searched or edited. For example, when you typically scan a document into your copier, the result you view on your computer screen is static image, most likely a PDF. You can't highlight the text, search through it or even edit it. However, if that same document is put through an OCR process when it's scanned, the text then becomes searchable and even editable because ...