Document Scanning Blog

Picture this: You are in charge of mid-sized law firm’s legal library. You manage an archive of legal documents and memoranda so vast that you appear more like a museum curator than an employee at a law practice. (Not an unusual description of most law libraries, by the way). And all of the time, document storage space, and money that you spend in managing that library has become a significant problem. So what is the fix? Thankfully, these days a digital conversion, wherein the majority of your legal paper is transmitted through digital document imaging to a digital platform, will usually do the trick. But not so long ago, in the days before OCR service (optical character recognition), if you ran a business, non-profit or an archive and you wanted to convert certain simple text-heavy paper documents to a safer, more efficient and cost effective digital platform, you would have been, well, swimming in a world of paper. In other words, you would have been stuck and out of luck. Fortunately, today that is no longer the case. But what is optical character recognition scanning, anyway? Well, to put it simply, OCR is a method of document scanning and converting “image files” (IE pictures of text such as “TIFFs” and “PDFs”) into editable documents that are text searchable. (IE “SPDFs and “.DOCs”). In other words, optical character recognition technology turns practically useless picture of documents into functionally workable documents that can be opened and edited on most word processing, desktop publishing and editing software. Revolutionary as OCR service technology has been, it has its risks as well. Most notably is the fact that no OCR transition is perfect. Typically, OCR transitions work best when the source material to be converted is simple (EG Times Roman or Courier font), clean, large (12 point or higher) black text against a white background. But the bottom line is that if maintaining the accuracy of your data in conversion is particularly important to you, you need to work with an experienced OCR document scanning company that takes additional steps to ensure that the new digital copies will be as close to the originals as possible.