Scanners and FMP

[The Mad Jammer]

My client would like to be able to use a scanned document to populate certain fields in a FMP database. I told him this is not possible because, first of all, scanned documents are images and secondly, there is no way to delimit a field on a scanned document so that FMP could import the field in to the database. Is there a plug-in that can read a scanned document, identify certain fields and plop them into a DB record?

Thanks

the Mad Jammer

and then... there was nothing

[John Caballero]

Container fields work really well at holding images. Do a search for a thread that cropped up recently called, I think, "path to images" or something like that.

[ESpringer]

I think Mad Jammer is talking about an OCR solution that would "read" the data off the forms. Some OCR software does that (including taking cues about which parts of the form count as "fields" and which as background text), and then exports in tab-delimited form which could be imported. But of course FileMaker itself doesn't do OCR.

[BobWeaver]

I've scanned documents and then OCR'd them to populate FM records. Omnipage pro is pretty good at OCR, but you likely still have to do some text manipulation inside Filemaker to get everything the way you want.