What Is OCR? And How It Reads Arabic Documents
OCR reads the text in a photo or a scanned page. For a business, the real question is whether the result comes out as data you can use.
OCR in one sentence
OCR, optical character recognition, finds the letters and numbers in an image and turns them into text a computer can search, copy or put into a spreadsheet.
Text is not the same as data
Copying a paragraph is easy. Business documents are harder, because what matters is structure: which dish goes with which price, which number is the invoice total, which line belongs to which column. Good OCR for business gives you rows and fields, not one long block of text.
Why Arabic is harder
- Text runs right to left, while numbers and English words inside it run left to right.
- Letters connect and change shape, and a missing dot changes the word.
- Documents mix Eastern Arabic digits (١٢٣) and Western digits (123).
- Many menus and forms are bilingual, with the same item in Arabic and English.
What makes the result usable
- A clear photo: taken straight on, in good light, with the whole page in the frame.
- Flags, not guesses: anything the system isn't sure about is marked for a person to check.
- A person checks the flagged items before the data is used.
- The right output: Excel, CSV or a direct connection to the system that needs the data.
Common questions.
Reading the text in a photo or a scan and turning it into text or data a computer can use.
Handwriting is much harder than print, and results vary a lot. Our demo is for printed menus and documents.
Yes. Request the demo and send one menu or document.
Have Paper That Should Be Data?
Send us one menu or document, and we run the demo on it.