Optical Character Recognition to read index data from scanned images, convert documents to searchable PDF or text files, dynamic field extraction and other OCR features.

 

SimpleIndex is the perfect solution for small business and departments looking to manage their files from a single interface, developers who don’t want to reinvent the wheel and large companies with many locations looking to decentralize their scanning. SimpleIndex organizes scanned images and electronic documents into a single document management database your employees can access on their desktops. SimpleIndex takes the labor out of document imaging by providing powerful barcode recognition and OCR search algorithms that can find index values no matter where they are on the page. By providing these essential automations for a reasonable price, we make document management affordable for anyone. The most unique automation is our OCR template and dictionary matching search algorithms. This lets you find information like date, customer name, invoice number and other information on documents with different layouts.

There are plenty of different Features of SimpleSoftware products making your automation process more efficient.

TaxStacker: Sort & Classify Federal Tax Documents

This is a great way for accountants and tax preparers to organize complex tax returns in a way that makes it easy to find specific documents. It can also be used to ensure all required schedules and supporting documents are present in the finished return.

Use our out-of-the-box TaxStacker configuration to automatically identify all the forms and schedules that make up a U.S. federal income tax return. These can then be sorted into separate PDF files or combined into a single file that has bookmarks to indicate each section.

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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 setting is also used as the delimiter when parsing multiple index field values from bar codes (e.g. field1|field2|field3). Right click on the SimpleIndex Configuration File (.sic file format) and Open With a text editor (Notepad, Wordpad, etc.).Then do a search for the following value:OCR_DICT_SEPARATORChange the | in the following to the desired separator value:<OCR_DICT_SEPARATOR>|<OCR_DICT_SEPARATOR> For TAB separation use %TAB%To enable the find and replace function configured on the OCR tab to run on the barcode values before template/dictionary matching​<BARCODE_REPLACE_CHARS>true</BARCODE_REPLACE_CHARS>
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Change the OCR Font or Type

This is used to changed the default OCR recognition font or type from the default, which is “To Be Detected” 1.  Right click on the .sic file and select Open With a text editor (Notepad, Wordpad, etc.) 2.  Find <OCR_TEXT_TYPE>.  If you can’t find <OCR_TEXT_TYPE> then add the following as the last row in the text file:   <OCR_TEXT_TYPE>#</OCR_TEXT_TYPE> 3.  Change the number in between:  <OCR_TEXT_TYPE>#</OCR_TEXT_TYPE> 4.  Number of desired font:             0  Normal1  Typewriter 2  Dotmatrix 3  Index4  Handprinted5  OCR A  6  OCR B 7  MICR E13B  8  MICR CMC7   9  Gothic       10  To Be Detected    
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Regular Expression (RegEx) – Syntax or Type

The Syntax or Type of Regular Expression/RegEx that SimpleIndex uses is .NET

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Document Classification

An essential first step to processing mixed batches with many types of documents is classification. Document Classification methods quickly sort documents by type using key content and layout attributes to identify them. The most popular document classification systems are advanced AI-based machine learning algorithms that automatically learn how to classify documents based on samples and user feedback. These systems are very powerful but also very expensive. Only large organizations processing millions of pages each year can afford these enterprise solutions. SimpleIndex naturally has a simpler way to do classification based on keyword patterns in the document text. Simply create a list of document types and assign one or more unique keywords or phrases that will only appear in that document type to each. Logical operators for AND, OR and NOT prevent false matches by requiring multiple keywords for matching or excluding documents that contain certain phrases. Keyword-based classificat
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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?

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 performance. Use the OCR applications to convert the scanned images to text or searchable PDF, and SimpleIndex can extract index values from the text and automatically sort and organize the files.

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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”

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 field. By adding the [5,2] you tell SimpleIndex to start at the 5th character (5) and take 2 characters from the value (50).

Find out more about barcode scanning on our Barcode Scanning Guide and read up on Optical Character Recognition on the SimpleOCR scanning solutions guide.

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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?

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 needs to be sufficient length to store the entire text of your document. Of course, the Insert Mode configuration must have “Enable Full Page OCR” checked to generate full text data from images. Text from MS Office documents, PDF files and existing OCR text files can be used without setting this option. When designing your Retrieval Mode configuration, create a Text field to use for full text search queries. On the Database tab, set the corresponding “Database Field Name” to the full text database field. When searching on your full text field, SimpleIndex finds the text you enter no matter where it appears in the document. It is able to match partial words. It does not perform boolean or natural language search

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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 varying the size of the zone to achieve optimal results. -For template matching, make sure all variations of the field format are included in the template list. -For dictionary matching, add common variations and OCR mistakes to the “thesaurus” list. -On the Zones & OCR tab (accessed from the Job Options) you can adjust the Max Errors setting to allow for more mistakes in the dictionary matching process. -Use the Strip Spaces, Strip Characters, Replace Characters and Case Fixing options to standardize the field format prior to matching. Please refer to the manual for details on how to configure these options. Find out more about Optical Character Recog

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Can OCR text be saved to MS Word or HTML formats?

Yes. On the Zones & OCR tab of the Job Options, there is a dropdown list for “Full-page OCR file type”. By default it is set to TEXT, but can be changed to WORD, HTML or PDF.

If the output file type is set to PDF, OCR text will be embedded as hidden text in the PDF file.

Find out more about Optical Character Recognition on the SimpleOCR Guide.

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Can SimpleIndex create searchable PDF Image+Text files with hidden text?

If you enable full-page OCR and output to PDF, the full-page OCR text will be inserted as invisible text on each page.

With the addition of the FineReader Engine in version 7, SimpleIndex now creates PDF files with fully searchable text formatted to flow with the image of the document.

Find out more about Optical Character Recognition on the SimpleOCR Guide.

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Your All-In-One Scanning & Sorting Tool

SimpleIndex® has the ability to perform a wide variety of scanning and document organization tasks quickly and automatically. This makes it a must-have tool for IT departments and consultants who often need to: Scan and store various documents on network shares Organize existing MS Office, PDF and other files on your network Attach files to records in a custom database Integrate scanning into custom business applications Automate data entry from paper or electronic documents Reduce click charges for centralized scanning departments The wide variety of scanning and indexing tasks you can do with SimpleIndex make it an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Even if your company already has an enterprise document scanning system, the low cost, fast setup and automated processing features of SimpleIndex can be put to use in many places where your existing system either doesn’t work, is too complex for the task or costs too much in click charges to be feasible. [widg-category
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Instant Integration With Any Application

SimpleIndex® provides a great alternative to “reinventing the wheel” using a document imaging SDK to implement scanning in your custom application. SimpleIndex uses a command line interface to enable developers to execute customized scanning workflows from another application. This lets you take advantage of SimpleIndex‘s TWAIN/ISIS scanning, zone OCR, barcode recognition and database export features without having to re-code them all yourself. Whether you are an IT consultant creating an application for internal company use or a software developer looking to add scanning features to your application, SimpleIndex provides the easiest solution available. To use SimpleIndex as a scanning front-end for your application, simply: Create a SimpleIndex job file configured to scan, index and save files the way you want (Optional) configure the database export to create/update document records in your DB Use a “Shell” command to execute the job file from your progr
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Patent ID and Title Extraction

To avoid manual data entry, pattern matching is used to automatically read the Patent ID Number and Title from any US patent application straight out of the box.

This job configuration is available for free for SimpleIndex users from the link below.

SimpleIndex Patents Demo Job Configuration

KB Articles for Patent ID and Title

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Indexing from Applications with Screen OCR

Some documents are difficult or impossible to automate with OCR. For example, documents with non-standard layouts, unconstrained handwriting or very poor scan quality. In applications like invoice processing, fully automating the data entry can require expensive software and weeks of consulting. Even after all that expense, many users miss the interface and data validations that their accounting software entry screens provide. In cases like this, SimpleIndex can help improve data entry efficiency while archiving your scanned originals at the same time. Here’s how it works: Scan a batch of documents for data entry Place the SimpleIndex window side-by-side with your data entry window Enter the data normally, reading from the scanned image in SimpleIndex Press the hotkey combo to transfer the data to SimpleIndex Save the image and repeat with the next one
In this configuration, SimpleIndex captur
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Automatic Indexing Using Existing Data

Automatic Indexing Using Existing Data The Autofill feature of SimpleIndex is an easy way to associate many index fields with one document without retyping data that already exists in another database. Autofill uses a database lookup to retrieve records that match a key value entered by the user. Blank index fields are then filled in automatically with the data from this lookup. The result is a document database with many different possible search fields, of which only one needed to be entered during scanning. The key field may be typed by the user, or it may be read from the document automatically using barcode recognition or OCR. The lookup is performed either when the user changes this field or when the index values are saved. If the lookup finds multiple matching records, the user will be notified and the first set of values will be used by default. When used with pre-index batches, key information can be read automatically from barcodes or OCR and matched to database records with
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OMR Optical Mark Recognition

Simple Checkbox Recognition Some forms require scanning software to recognize the presence or absence of a mark in a particular location, such as a checkbox, without worrying about the specific shape or symbol drawn therein. The ability to do this is called Optical Mark Recognition, or OMR. Let’s take a look at how this feature can help you index your documents and how SimpleIndex improves upon the standard OMR process: Optical Mark Recognition Optical Mark Recognition lets you define check box regions on scanned images. OMR is very fast and can be used for a variety of applications: Business reply mail Simple surveys Separate multi-page documents Document routing control Verify presence of signatures To configure OMR, use an unfilled form to obtain baseline counts of how many black “pixels” are in the box. When processing, SimpleIndex compares the amount of black in each image to the baseline value to determine if the box is checked or not. With OMR, it is very impor
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SimpleIndex Walkthrough

The SimpleIndex® Design Philosophy SimpleIndex differs from other high-speed scanning applications in that it is designed around a single batch processing model. More expensive programs are designed to process batches in multiple stages that run on separate computers like an assembly line. These stages are: Import (scan or read existing files) Process (cleanup, OCR, barcode recognition) Index (assign keyword values for filenames or search fields) Quality Control (review, revise & rescan) Export (create file structure, export index values to log or database) What if your assembly line only has one worker? Other packages require the user to enter a separate set of commands to launch each stage. SimpleIndex is designed to quickly scan and index a single batch by performing each stage automatically in sequence. This design makes SimpleIndex much faster and easier to use than other scanning software, and lowers the cost as well. SimpleIndex replaces the series of individual commands req
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Streamlined Interface

The Fastest, Most Accurate Scanning Solution As with any repetitive task, a few seconds saved scanning and filing a single document quickly adds up to dozens or hundreds of hours over the course of a long project or daily routine. The most import part of planning your imaging project is to find the most efficient way to capture documents and file them correctly. Creating an efficient scanning and indexing process will save you countless hours of labor over the life of your project. SimpleIndex is faster and easier because it is designed to perform all of the steps necessary to scan, process, verify and export images in one continuous workflow rather than requiring the user to click extra buttons each time to initiate the next step. When taken to the extreme, SimpleIndex is capable of performing all of these tasks automatically just by clicking an icon on your desktop or a link in a browser. SimpleIndex does this by saving all of the settings for a scanning workflow to a file that can b
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