Hi,

I saw a product that is supposed to scan a driver's license and place the text in database fields. (www.id-scan.com). I was wondering how this works, and if anyone has any thoughts about how you could go about doing that in Filemaker.... it looks cool.

Vandy

I assume that the scan results in a TIF. You could then import that into a container field in your file.

Vandy:

The driver's license scanner system pulls data out of a mag-stripe, bar code (or, in the case of id-scan, using OCR technology on the actual text) on the driver's license and populates fields from that info. I couldn't tell you how to emulate id-scan's method in FMP - you'd need to know how the data is formatted for every kind of license you're going to encounter, for starters. The mag-stripe and bar code methods are much the same, but at least you're going to end up with a fairly straightforward load of ASCII data to work with. In the end, it's trial-and-error until you get the formatting right...

It's a lot of work, whichever way you look at it.

-Stanley

Vandy:

The driver's license scanner system pulls data out of a mag-stripe, bar code (or, in the case of id-scan, using OCR technology on the actual text) on the driver's license and populates fields from that info. I couldn't tell you how to emulate id-scan's method in FMP - you'd need to know how the data is formatted for every kind of license you're going to encounter, for starters. The mag-stripe and bar code methods are much the same, but at least you're going to end up with a fairly straightforward load of ASCII data to work with. In the end, it's trial-and-error until you get the formatting right...

It's a lot of work, whichever way you look at it.

-Stanley

Vandy:

The driver's license scanner system pulls data out of a mag-stripe, bar code (or, in the case of id-scan, using OCR technology on the actual text) on the driver's license and populates fields from that info. I couldn't tell you how to emulate id-scan's method in FMP - you'd need to know how the data is formatted for every kind of license you're going to encounter, for starters. The mag-stripe and bar code methods are much the same, but at least you're going to end up with a fairly straightforward load of ASCII data to work with. In the end, it's trial-and-error until you get the formatting right...

It's a lot of work, whichever way you look at it.

-Stanley