Scanners: OCR Technology Makes Typing a Thing of the Past

Greenfield, Elizabeth, T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education)

A district supervisor decides to update policy manuals created five years ago, before computers were integrated into his office. He, or rather his secretary, faces hours of typing in order to make either a few or numerous corrections to the old text. Hours of productivity are lost.

An English professor wants to incorporate several short stories into her curriculum materials, which are all organized on her personal computer. Her only option appears to be to use the department's photocopier, whose output is often poor in quality, and generate handouts to go alongside her materials. But adding her own notes and coordinating the texts with the course's theme are difficult and the end product lacks cohesion.

For these or any other educators and administrators who wish for a way to magically transform a document into a computer file, there is an answer--optical character recognition (OCR). Achieved via software and a scanner, OCR is the missing link between hard copy and a word processor, allowing users to import documents; edit, change and delete copy; and print out final versions or integrate the material into an existing electronic file.

Puzzle Pieces

There are several pieces to the OCR puzzle. Needed are a computer, a scanner (flatbed, sheet-fed or hand-hold), OCR software and a word processor. All of these pieces must also be coordinated--although many scanners are compatible with either DOS or Macintosh computers, OCR software is much more specific. Versions for the Mac, for instance, generally require a Mac II computer with 2MB or 4MB of available RAM memory.

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Scanners: OCR Technology Makes Typing a Thing of the Past. Contributors: Greenfield, Elizabeth - Author. Journal title: T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education). Volume: 19. Issue: 3 Publication date: October 1991. Page number: 6+. © 2009 1105 Media, Inc. COPYRIGHT 1991 Gale Group.

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