Zone OCR, also called zonal OCR, reads index values from a box drawn in the same place on every page. SimpleIndex pairs it with dynamic OCR, which finds a value anywhere on the page, so documents that shift in the scanner still read correctly. The posts below show zone OCR in real jobs.

Zone and dynamic OCR in SimpleIndex →

SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Turn Any Smartphone into a Field Scanner for SimpleIndex

Mobile Capture Meets Desktop Power: A SimpleIndex Google Drive Workflow What do you do when field staff, remote workers, or team members on the go need to process paper documents, but don’t have access to a desktop scanner? While SimpleIndex is a desktop powerhouse for batch OCR, indexing, and data extraction, you don’t need a
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Canvassing and Political Surveys Processing

The Clipboard is Back: Why Paper Canvassing Wins in Local Campaigns (and How to Automate the Data Entry) It’s election season, and campaigns are hitting the pavement. While consultants push for mobile canvassing apps, any field organizer knows the reality: apps crash, devices die, and volunteers – especially older ones – frequently rebel against new
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Health Claims OCR Tips – Elevating Your Health Claims Processing

Health Claims OCR: Mastering Complex Medical & Dental Forms Processing Managing healthcare claims can feel like a constant battle against complex layouts, low-quality scans, and strict data validation requirements. Manual data entry is a massive bottleneck that delays reimbursement, ties up billing staff, and increases costly filing errors. This month, we are focusing on how
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – OCR Document Separation

OCR Document Separation Streamline Your Workflow with OCR Document Separation In a previous newsletter, we shared one of our favorite low-tech, high-efficiency hacks: OMR Document Separation. For teams dealing with highly variable, unstandardized paperwork, making a simple black mark with a felt pen on the first page of a new document is an incredibly fast
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Database Integration – Unprecedented Control of Database Interactions

SimpleIndex built-in Database Autofill – Automatic Indexing Using Existing Data Did you know SimpleIndex offers Unprecedented Control of Database Interactions? Unlike “closed” systems that trap your data in a proprietary silo, SimpleIndex was built for open interoperability. It doesn’t just scan files; it talks directly to your custom programs and existing workflows. By mapping index fields directly
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Creating PDFs from XML or JSON Data

Fill out forms or create human-readable PDFs from electronic transactions More and more transactions that used to be document-centric are now taking place electronically using XML or JSON structured data files. However, the archives for these transactions may still use document management tools. For example, Accounts Payable Invoices may be sent as data files for
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks – Document Separation

OMR Document Separation Fast, accurate document separation without barcode separator sheets A unique but lesser-known feature of SimpleIndex is the ability to separate documents with Optical Mark Recognition (OMR). Many document capture applications have OMR, but few use that capability to do document separation. It offers a huge opportunity to save on document preparation costs
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SimpleIndex Tips & Tricks Handprint Recognition

Did you know that SimpleIndex can read handwriting? Now you do! SimpleIndex 11.4 gives you the option to read all kinds of handwriting. This can be done with both the FineReader and the AWS Textract OCR engines. FineReader works best with forms that have letter boxes or combs to ensure that they are filled out
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Automatic Form Alignment

Big improvements to OMR and Zone OCR in SimpleIndex 11.4 If you have tried to do checkbox recognition with scanned forms, you are probably aware of how sensitive they are to any minor differences in the image. This is especially the case if they are not all scanned on the same device. Any shifting or
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SimpleIndex 11 – More Than “Just an Update”

We almost switched to Roman Numerals, it’s that big of a deal The most significant update in years, SimpleIndex 11 introduces major new features like handwriting recognition and email processing, while optimizing existing features to dramatically improve processing speeds for large batches and files. Some more major new features are: Get the full list of new features and fixes on the SimpleIndex Wiki.
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SimpleIndex 11.4 Release Notes

SimpleIndex 11.4 new version, adds major new features like an easy option to customize what emails need to be processed from email boxes by setting dates and subfolders and automatically updating them each time these emails are processed. Additionally, ChatGPT integration was added. This allows you to extract index values and text from any document
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Automatic Image Splitting

Speed up scanning of multi-page layouts and spreads with SimpleIndex’s built-in tools Magazines, pamphlets, booklets and similar documents can be a scanning headache, particularly when you want to capture each page, or even each block of text, as its own separate file. Splitting the pages and cropping each one to its final format adds hours
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Zone OCR and Dynamic OCR

Read the values, not just the text
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Language Pack for Standard/Tesseract OCR

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Global Settings Wizard reference. All versions of the SimpleIndex software include OCR with the Standard/Tesseract OCR engine. The SimpleIndex download only includes a limited set of languages with the installation. If the language you would like to OCR with SimpleIndex isn’t one of the languages included then you can download
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Languages Supported in SimpleSoftware OCR Engines

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Languages reference. SimpleSoftware OCR engines are using two different systems for language support. In the end languages supported by your OCR is based on your version of SimpleIndex installed, any addons (SimpleIndex Server, SimpleCoversheet, and so on) do not add any additional language support. All SimpleSoftware products have Tesseract 3.02
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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 can be useful in cases where the values you would like in your list or dictionary might include the pipe character or “|” or “Shift Backslash” This setting is
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Change the OCR Font or Type

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete OCR Options reference. This is used to changed the default OCR recognition font or type from the default, which is “To Be Detected”. This can be used to look for a specific type of OCR font and is especially useful for recognizing things like Dotmatrix, OCR A and OCR B.
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Regular Expression (RegEx) – Syntax or Type

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Regular Expressions reference. SimpleIndex uses the .NET regular expressions library. .NET uses the JavaScript/ECMAScript regular expression syntax format. For more information see the Regular Expressions Wiki Page.
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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?

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Full-Page OCR reference. 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
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  • Published in OCR
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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”

Please refer to the Wiki Documentation for the complete Bar Code Recognition reference. 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
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