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File Format Buffet! – choosing your output format

Anymore OCR and figures capture solutions give you a broad selection of what output format you want the result to be in. Until the advent of layered file formats your only choices were line only such as Word .Doc or Plain Text .txt. But now formats themselves have come with a ton of options, leaving people to walk away decision first on what export format to use then what variation of that format.

It seems for the most part OCR is exported in one of two primary formats Word .Doc or Portable Document Format .PDF. So we will use these as our staples.

Huddle is more or less a text only format, scanning and converting a document to word is useful for when you want to make edits to the school-book, reformat, add graphics, and then re-create the document, or borrow it’s contents. Some of the options included in this format narration to OCR and Data Capture are keep formatting, keep graphics, and encoding. It’s fairly easy to decide of these options which would be most gainful to your process. The text formats from document conversion are usually limited to immediate consumption and not grouping, the layered formats are for distribution and storage.

There are actually many layered file formats. There are even formats of JPEG and Row that permit a text layer. In the last few years Microsoft released their own “layered” format called XPS, who’s renown has yet to catch on. PDF is still the winner in this area. PDF comes with a salad bar of options, and sometimes it’s hard to pick what is first. When used in conjunction with data capture and OCR the most common variation of PDF is a PDF with search-able text under messenger image. What this means is that the visible layer of the PDF is the scanned image, underneath it with matching coordinates is the theme from OCR or Data Capture. The purpose is by searching the text you will find on the image the contents of your search. Because PDF is for the most part a locked down format it’s prominent to decide first what variation you want before ever creating one. Other common settings are tagging, password protection, PDF/A for archiving, and bookmarks. When acclimatized with Data Capture and OCR you will see PDF/A frequently for long term archiving of documents, and password protection. The settings tagging and bookmarks mostly require an additional manual step unless the Data Capture program supports components of this meta data. If you keep the quality of the image layer for any layered format high enough, you can OCR it again if you make a mistake in your format.

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