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Glossary

OCR

Quick answer

Optical character recognition: software that turns text in scans, photos or PDFs into machine-readable text.

Many business archives are scanned forms, invoices, contracts and handwritten notes. OCR makes them searchable and usable, but it makes mistakes, especially with handwriting, tables and poor scans.

Before scanned records are licensed, OCR output is usually checked for accuracy and reviewed for personal details, because names and numbers inside images are easy to miss.

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