Question

Can Laserfiche OCR scan words into the searchable database?

Version 9 Laserfiche How To Search and Retrieval

Updated January 15, 2021

asked on January 14, 2021

We're running Laserfiche 9.2.1.562. Our Law Department would like to scan older documents into Laserfiche. They would like to be able to search words within the document post scanning. Is it possible to OCR/scan words into the search database, so document with certain key words would populate during a normal search?

What is the best way to accomplish this?

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replied on January 14, 2021

Performing OCR on the document makes its text searchable.

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replied on January 15, 2021

Right, I get that. But I tried a few times and it didn't seem to work correctly. So I'm looking for a walkthrough on how to properly perform this action.

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replied on January 15, 2021

If you view the text that was extracted from the pages, does it look correct? Poor image quality or incorrect scanner settings can make it hard for OCR to get usable text. If the text looks correct, and a search for one of the words that you see was identified doesn't return the document, then maybe the document hasn't been indexed yet. Check the index settings in the administration console. Also, can you successfully search for other documents?

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replied on January 15, 2021 • Show version history

OCRing as you are scanning should work, but it will depend on the age and often the typeface in the older documents. The OCR client in Laserfiche is not as fully functional as I would like, and there seems to be no option to adapt the engine to older typefaces. If those documents were produced using a typewriter, then your OCR may not work very well.

You will need to adapt the scanning defaults to try to account for the type of pages you are scanning. Play around a bit with the defaults until you have something that works well. I have three typical saved setups for my scanning; one for older typed documents; one for documents with coloured pages; and one for regular recent documents.

The alternative is to perhaps scan the older documents into a PDF version using a program such as Omnipage Pro, and then import those into Laserfiche. I have also heard the Abbyy FineReader is good at scanning/OCRing older documents but I have never used it.

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Can Laserfiche OCR scan words into the searchable database?

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