How do you configure OCR to read index information from MS Office or PDF documents?

MS Office and PDF files generated by software or PDF printer drivers already have the text you need to recognize in the file. Scanned documents need to use OCR to read text from an image of the page. With Office and PDF files, SimpleIndex can just read the text, which is much faster and accurate than image OCR.

To recognize index fields from the document text, first create OCR fields on the Index tab as you would normally. Next, on the Zones & OCR options tab, check the “Use Full Page OCR for this Field” option for each OCR field. This tells SimpleIndex to process the existing file text.

If the index value is a unique pattern of digits or list of possible values, use Template or Dictionary matching to locate the value within the text. Please see the manual for details on Template and Dictionary matching.

If the value appears in a specific location in each file, coordinates can be used to locate it. When processing text, the X, Y, Width and Height settings correspond to line and column numbers within the file text. This is explained in greater depth in the manual.

SimpleIndex will assume that any TXT file with the same name as a file being processed is the OCR text for that file, so this method can work with any type of file.

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