Once you've used an OCR system, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one. OCR software works in conjunction with a scanner to capture and translate printed text into files that can be read by a word-processing, database, or spreadsheet program. In the anesthesiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital, we have a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4c flatbed scanner and at least a dozen Visioneer PaperPort scanners. Faculty, residents, and secretaries use the OCR systems to digitize a seemingly endless stack of documents, including administrative forms, journal articles for distribution to residents over e-mail, and curricula vitae for posting on the World Wide Web. The backbone of any OCR system is the scanner hardware, because it's responsible for capturing an image of the printed page.
Flatbed scanners look and work somewhat like a desktop copier machine.
You lift the protective cover, place a document facedown on the glass surface, close the cover, and give instructions, via computer control, to scan the document. Hewlett-Packard, MicroTek, and Umax are known for their affordable flatbed scanners. Roller scanners, typified by the inexpensive Visioneer PaperPort, are designed much like a pasta maker or an old-fashioned wringer washing machine. These tiny but capable scanners accept one unbound page at a time. They're great for occasional scanning of loose copies, but because of their construction, they can't scan books or other bound documents.