Zone OCR is used to read document indexes or tags from text on the page. It is a great way to automate the data entry associated with scanning documents.

However, there are several limitations to zone OCR that must be overcome:

  • Index information must be in the exact same place on every page
  • Documents shift and skew during scanning, causing the zones to not line up
  • If surrounding lines or text on the document are too close, they can encroach on the zone

SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Creating PDFs from XML or JSON Data

Fill out forms or create human-readable PDFs from electronic transactions More and more transactions that used to be document-centric are now taking place electronically using XML or JSON structured data files. However, the archives for these transactions may still use document management tools. For example, Accounts Payable Invoices may be sent as data files for
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Document Separation

OMR Document Separation Fast, accurate document separation without barcode separator sheets A unique but lesser-known feature of SimpleIndex is the ability to separate documents with Optical Mark Recognition (OMR). Many document capture applications have OMR, but few use that capability to do document separation. It offers a huge opportunity to save on document preparation costs
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks Handprint Recognition

Did you know that SimpleIndex can read handwriting? Now you do! SimpleIndex 11.4 gives you the option to read all kinds of handwriting. This can be done with both the FineReader and the AWS Textract OCR engines. FineReader works best with forms that have letter boxes or combs to ensure that they are filled out
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Automatic Form Alignment

Big improvements to OMR and Zone OCR in SimpleIndex 11.4 If you have tried to do checkbox recognition with scanned forms, you are probably aware of how sensitive they are to any minor differences in the image. This is especially the case if they are not all scanned on the same device. Any shifting or
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SimpleIndex 11 – More Than “Just an Update”

We almost switched to Roman Numerals, it’s that big of a deal The most significant update in years, SimpleIndex 11 introduces major new features like handwriting recognition and email processing, while optimizing existing features to dramatically improve processing speeds for large batches and files. Some more major new features are: Get the full list of new features and fixes on the SimpleIndex Wiki.
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SimpleIndex 11.4 Release Notes

SimpleIndex 11.4 new version, adds major new features like an easy option to customize what emails need to be processed from email boxes by setting dates and subfolders and automatically updating them each time these emails are processed. Additionally, ChatGPT integration was added. This allows you to extract index values and text from any document
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Automatic Image Splitting

Speed up scanning of multi-page layouts and spreads with SimpleIndex’s built-in tools Magazines, pamphlets, booklets and similar documents can be a scanning headache, particularly when you want to capture each page, or even each block of text, as its own separate file. Splitting the pages and cropping each one to its final format adds hours
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Zone OCR and Dynamic OCR

Other document scanning applications in this price range use Zone OCR to obtain index data from the page. SimpleIndex improves upon this time-tested but limited model with its Dynamic OCR feature. Let’s look at the difference between the two methods: Zone OCR Zone OCR is used to read document indexes or tags from text on
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Language Pack for Standard/Tesseract OCR

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Global Settings Wizard reference. All versions of the SimpleIndex software include OCR with the Standard/Tesseract OCR engine. The SimpleIndex download only includes a limited set of languages with the installation. If the language you would like to OCR with SimpleIndex isn’t one of the languages included then you can download
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Languages Supported in SimpleSoftware OCR Engines

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Languages reference. SimpleSoftware OCR engines are using two different systems for language support. In the end languages supported by your OCR is based on your version of SimpleIndex installed, any addons (SimpleIndex Server, SimpleCoversheet, and so on) do not add any additional language support. All SimpleSoftware products have Tesseract 3.02
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Change the Dictionary Separator Value

This is used to change the dictionary separator value when doing thesaurus matching from the default character of | to any character(s) that you want. This can be useful in cases where the values you would like in your list or dictionary might include the pipe character or “|” or “Shift Backslash” This setting is
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Change the OCR Font or Type

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete OCR Options reference. This is used to changed the default OCR recognition font or type from the default, which is “To Be Detected”. This can be used to look for a specific type of OCR font and is especially useful for recognizing things like Dotmatrix, OCR A and OCR B.
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Regular Expression (RegEx) – Syntax or Type

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Regular Expressions reference. SimpleIndex uses the .NET regular expressions library. .NET uses the JavaScript/ECMAScript regular expression syntax format. For more information see the Regular Expressions Wiki Page.
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I’m using full page OCR. The information is all appearing in the txt file but it is losing format about half way through. Data to the right is ending up at the end of the txt doc. Can this be fixed?

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Full-Page OCR reference. SimpleIndex version 7 solves this problem with the incorporation of the FineReader OCR engine. Full text in PDFs will now flow with the formatting of the PDF. Legacy Versions: SimpleIndex can also be used with other OCR applications and servers to improve accuracy, formatting and
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  • Published in OCR
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Is there a way to just use part of a bar code or OCR value? For example, extract “50” from the value “124450”

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Bar Code Recognition reference. To do this example, create a barcode field (Field 1 for example) and a 2nd field with type “Fixed”. In the template for the 2nd field, enter %FIELD1[5,2]% to get “50” from “124450”. %FIELD1% would get the entire value for Field #1, the barcode
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How do you train the OCR engine for better accuracy?

Training has been removed with version 7 due to the addition of the ABBYY FineReader OCR engine.
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  • Published in OCR
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How do you configure full text searching in Retrieval mode?

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Database Settings reference. On the Database tab there dropdown in the lower portion of the panel for Full Text OCR Field. Put the name of the field that will store the full-text data there. This must be configured both for Insert and Retrieval mode configurations. The database field
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How can I improve recognition rates for my OCR fields?

There are several things you can do to improve accuracy for OCR. Scan at 300dpi, black & white for best results. Adjust the scan settings to remove background noise and improve the definition of characters. For Zone OCR, field recognition can often vary based on the surrounding white space and text in the zone. Try
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  • Published in OCR
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Can OCR text be saved to Office, Text, HTML or other formats?

Yes.  On the OCR step of the Job Settings Wizard you can select the text output format need in the “Full-page OCR file type” drop down. By default it is set to PDF, but can be changed to Text (txt), Word (docx), Rich Text (rtf), Open Office (odt), Excel (xlsx), PowerPoint (pptx), ePub Zip (epub),
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Can SimpleIndex create searchable PDF Image+Text files with hidden text?

Yes, it can.  You can configure this setting in the Job Settings Wizard by going to the OCR step and checking “Enable full-page OCR”.  There are many settings in the OCR step that you can used to customize the output and recognition of images. SimpleIndex has two different OCR engines (Standard and Professional) that can
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