Limitations

You should understand that OCR is not a perfect technology. The results yielded are influenced by several factors including:

• Scanner quality--higher resolution scanners with quality optics will produce output which may be easier for the OCR software to more accurately convert to text characters. The scanner attached to the Multimedia Workstation is of fair quality and should be adequate for most OCR purposes.
• OCR software--how well the OCR software parses the scanned image and translates it to text characters is important. The OCR software on the Multimedia Workstation is Omnipage Pro and where good image quality is involved it does accurate OCR. It is inevitable that the software will sometimes fail to convert some words (with possibly amusing results) but you will have the chance to correct any errors before saving the document.
• Copy quality--if you scan pages with microscopic text or pages with blobs of ink and debris you drastically increase the chance of poor OCR and extra time to correct the resulting spelling errors. Avoid scanning handwriting: the results may be hilarious but seldom anything useful will come of it.

Of the factors listed above only the last, document quality, may be within your control: where possible try to use good quality copies with typed text of reasonable pitch (10-12 point or greater).