OCR Processing

Included within the DTWAIN library is the ability to use third-party Optical Character Recognition (OCR) modules within the application. The OCR capabilities requires that you have the proper third-party OCR engine installed. Dynarithmic Software provides no OCR engines. DTWAIN's role is to interface to third-party OCR engines, which must be obtained separately by the customer or programmer by contacting the manufacturer.

Currently, DTWAIN supports the TOCR Version 2.0 and above OCR engine from Transym Computer Services. Subsequent versions of DTWAIN will support other OCR engines.

The OCR processing allows your application to do the following:

•	Retrieve text from an image file using the OCR engine, and save the converted text to a text file.

•	Acquire a file from the TWAIN device, and use the OCR engine to translate the file to a text file.

•	Acquire and create searchable PDF files using the OCR engine to generate the text.

Regardless of the OCR engine, DTWAIN maintains a transparent interface between your program and the particular OCR engine that is to be used. This means that your program will be portable between different engines, as DTWAIN acts as a proxy between your application and the OCR engine.

DTWAIN accomplishes this by creating a TWAIN-like interface to the various OCR engines. For example, DTWAIN has defined various OCR capabilities that can be queried or set using the same set of functions, selection of the OCR engine can be done using a "TWAIN" dialog or by using the engine's name, etc.

Initializing the OCR Interface