One of eDoc Organizer’s most loved features is its OCR, or optical character recognition. Although this feature has been part of our document management software for years, let’s take a moment to better understand what OCR is and how it works.

OCR is an algorithm based process where your scanned documents’ text is electronically read and differentiated into something the software is able to read. OCR is able to determine the difference between text and images by interpreting the light and dark areas of the page. It further translates where the text ends and the background begins, allowing it to interpret what letters are on the page. OCR does well with a vast range of fonts and languages, but can sometimes have trouble with handwritten words.

After the software has recognized the words on the page, eDoc Organizer stores them in its search index so that you can search for the document by those words later. OCR eliminates the need to manually enter all that document information and thus saves you time and effort in your organization. By having the ability to search for any text within a document, you can use any of the key aspects of that document to be able to search for it. This enables you to find a document quickly, based on little information.

If you are having difficulties with your OCR, check the quality of the scan you have your scanner set to. The finer the image, the better the OCR will do. For best results, we recommend that you scan ‘Black and White’ with ‘Normal’ scan quality in eDoc Organizer. Some documents will naturally do better with OCR because of the non-text aspect of the page. For example, pages with busy or bold backgrounds will have a harder time with OCR accuracy. If your business has specific OCR needs, our development team will be happy to discuss them with you.

eDoc Organizer offers OCR in 8 major languages, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Danish, which are available in all of our editions. If you would like us to write a blog explaining another specific feature, or would like to see a specific language added to our OCR list, please contact us at [email protected]