What is optical character recognition (OCR)?
Is computer software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text, or to translate pictures of characters into a standard encoding scheme representing them (e.g. ASCII or Unicode). In essence if a document is scanned, it appears as an image, once OCR has been applied to this image the characters of the writing on the page become usable. eg. Before OCR, if someone wanted to turn a book into a word processing file, each page would have to be typed word for word, with OCR, the book can be scanned, and then OCR applied, allowing the book to now be editable in a word processor.
