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The first thing you have to make up your mind is what you essentially want to accomplish. Then, you look for solutions to accomplish that, and the very last thing are the technical details.
There are also a few elementary rules (thanks Dov): Text beats Vector beats Raster. When it comes to reading from paper, there is another rule: 2D (barcode) beats 1D (barcode) beats OCR.
If your conclusion is that you are going for a barcode solution, you will again have to decide on what character range and what error correction range you will need. This will determine the barcode system, and then you can start thinking about the implementation. For one-dimensional barcodes, there are quite a few systems which actually work with simple usage of fonts. Other systems would require some logic behind the barcode generation. It all depends on your needs.
Hope, this can help.
Max Wyss PRODOK Engineering Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
Fax: +41 1 700 20 37 or +1 815 425 6566 e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.prodok.com
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I need to be able to slap a line of digits with spaces on the top of each document generated, scan it in, OCR just that identifying line, and archive/file the document with the matching digits.
Ideally, the scanning would be done with the ubiquitous settings of 300 dpi and saved as a JPEG.
I'm using Clara to OCR the documents, though, and it seems to like 600 dpi a LOT better so far...
Perhaps more pattern-training or more easily-identified characters would be help.
Which have y'all found to work acceptably for this kind of application:
Courier or other fixed-width font? MICR? barcode? ?????
And *which* of the 700 barcode fonts I could buy works best?
Or, which KINDS of fonts should I be looking at? .afm? .otf? TrueType? FreeType? These font guys sure like to make things complicated :-)
I can embed the font in the PDF, right?... But how big will it be? Can I fairly easily strip out everything except 0123456789 and the space?
OpenSource products are VASTLY preferred, if at all possible.
On-line searches are leaving me with my head spinning in a sea of indistinguishable "solutions" :-( Any good "How-To" or comparison studies out there?
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