Gadgetory

you know it's pretty easy to take words on your computer screen and put them on a physical sheet of paper just click print and unless you've forgotten to fork out an extortion level amount of money for a new cartridge you'll have fresh warm satisfying documents just a few moments later but going in the opposite direction scanning dead tree information into your PC is actually quite a bit trickier I mean sure flatbed scanners aren't all that difficult to operate per se but many of them are basically just taking a picture of the document and saving it on to your PC meaning not only will it probably not look very crisp but due to file compression and little bits of dust in your scanner but you can't edit a clean copy of your document in your favorite word processor because the scanner won't recognize each individual character fortunately there are a number of devices out there that enable optical character recognition or OCR where each character on a page is scanned individually so your papers are uploaded as actual text documents instead of messy JPEGs but how exactly does that work and is one kind of optical scanner better than another well because the whole concept of translating text into electronic signal is pretty broad there have been lots of different implementations of OCR over the years in fact one of the earliest electric OCR devices the opto phone was invented all the way back in 1914 this bizarre-looking contraption relied on the special behavior of selenium which conducts electricity differently in light and darkness as it scanned the words on a page the opto phone distinguished between the dark ink of text and lighter blank spaces generating tones that correspond to different letters making it possible for blind people to read with some practice later in 1931 a machine was developed that could convert printed text to Telegraph code one of the first technologies to translate printed characters to electrical impulses rather than sounds but it wasn't until the 1960s and 70s that OCR began to take a more familiar modern form with postal services using OCR to read addresses and software that could recognize many different fonts so back to present day when you scan a document how exactly does the software know what it's looking at well the first step is to cut out artifacts so your OCR program can concentrate on the text and nothing else so it attempts to remove dust and other various graphics align the text properly and convert any colors or shades of gray in the image to black and white only making the words themselves easier to recognize the next step is to figure out which characters are on the page simpler forms of OCR compare each scanned letter pixel by pixel to a known database of fonts and decide on the closest match smarter OCR however takes this step farther by breaking down each character down to constituent elements like curves and corners and looking for matching physical features and actual letters you can think of the differences between these two approaches similarly to the difference between raster and vector images which you can learn more about up here OCR software can also make use of a dictionary so it won't accidentally spit out nonsense words due to inaccurate scanning for example if your scanner sees this but it can't quite tell whether the middle letter is an O or an A it can check its own dictionary to decide that the word is actually dog and not gag giving OCR software situational information can further cut down on errors such as telling it to only try to match numbers if it's reading zip codes on an envelope even with these tricks however OCR obviously is not perfect which you've probably seen for yourself if you've ever used it but with greater processing power and machine learning techniques that allow software to recognize more subtle patterns over time OCR has become versatile enough to recognize harder to read typefaces in consistently printed material and even handwriting and free OCR cloud processing services like Google Drive which has a lot more machine learning capability than your home PC for which I hope our fairly obvious reasons have made OCR more accessible than her no word yet though on whether Google will take it a step further and launch Google interpretive dance translator I don't know have to ignore me are you racing against the clock is a freelancer trying to start you're challenging but rewarding interpretive dance company with the growth of the Internet there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed to meet this need check out freshbooks cloud accounting software designed for the way that you work it's the simplest and easiest way to be more productive organized and more importantly get paid quickly you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds which is super important and you can set up online payments with just a couple clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can even see when a client 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