Handwritten text in scanned documents
The jump from the age of paper documents into the digital age is a complex one, and it is accompanied by the conversion of massive stacks of documents into electronic files. The paper documents that are scanned and saved electronically can include many different types of documents, from printed texts to letters and forms containing handwritten responses. The difficulty of document conversion lies in the effort to make scanned documents completely comparable to digital documents, and this includes text-searchability. Fortunately, it is possible to make a handwritten document text-searchable with the help of special software.
The difference between OCR and ICR
There are two types of software that can be used to make scanned documents searchable and editable, and the type of software that you need depends on the contents of the documents. For printed text, you should use OCR, or optical character recognition. For handwritten text, there is a different type of software called ICR, or intelligent character recognition. ICR uses different algorithms from OCR, and it has more flexibility, being able to recognize the handwriting of different people. This is a very impressive capability, considering the amount of variation that exists between different people's writing styles.
Using ICR in document automation
ICR is an important component in the automation of scanned documents, because many of the documents that lend themselves to automatic processing contain handwritten text. Document automation refers to the automatic sorting of scanned documents and extraction of information. ICR widens the field of possibilities for documents that can be automated, so that you are no longer limited to forms that consist solely of printed text. ICR provides a fast, reliable way to extract handwritten information from scanned documents and save it as digital text in a spreadsheet.
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