What you scan is what you get
Michael Arthur Riccioli · Les Cahiers de l APLIUT · 1993
Can teachers and researchers really save time by using a hand-held scanner when they need to enter lengthy documents into their computers instead of having to type them ? The electronic process which allows the computer to 'read' an image and then to convert it into words is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). When the computer comes across a hard-to-recognise character it can be 'trained' to recognise several occurrences of that same character. Some programmes even have an omnifont feature (Machine Learned Fragment Analysis - MLFA) which is able to read and convert complex fonts.