Optical Character Readers (OCR)
Optical Character Readers (OCR) are devices that can detect patterns of marks which are in character format (numbers, letters, punctuation and some special characters like ‘ – , @ ’, etc.). Only printed characters can be recognised because it is not easy to cater for different styles of handwriting. The characters are converted by a scanner from picture format into coded characters that the computer can work with. This is normally in ASCII format (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). OCR software can be purchased separately for use with a standard A4 scanner. OCR is often used to scan text for use in a word processor.
Advantages:
• When a computerised document has not been saved and only printed text is available, it is possible to use OCR to scan in the text for later editing and re-arrangement.
Disadvantages:
• Some characters cannot easily be interpreted and errors occur during conversion. This is especially true if there are a lot of diagrams and characters laid out in a way the software cannot interpret.
