Document scanners and OCR

Optical character reading (OCR) software

If you want to scan data, documents or faxes you need optical character reading (OCR) software. This has the capability of recognizing letters and words, converting a scanned image, which is nothing more than a collection of dots (pixels) into letters, numbers, annotation marks and symbols, into text a word processing or spreadsheet program can understand.

Building up an archive of your letters, reports and other documents is becoming more popular for keeping a record for administration and tax purposes. OCR software is available in many languages. A scanned document can also be directly faxed if you still have a modem installed.