scanning documents

[Oldsneekers]

I am using a FM5 solution for document management by importing a referrence for scanned documents into a containor field. These cannot be used for "find" so the identifying data (used to find the document) needs to be entered manually. Can OCR'd scanned documents be entered into a text field that can then be indexed for "find"? If so, any suggestions on such a good scanner and OCR application. My Umax Astra MX3 is rather slow with 20 sec per scan and the OCR is useless.

[BobWeaver]

Yes, once you OCR the document, you can put it in a text field, and Filemaker will index it and you can search for it.

I use Caere OmniPage Pro OCR software. It's quite accurate at conversion and will work automatically with a scanner that has an automatic document feeder so that you don't have to stand there and feed pages in one at a time. My scanner doesn't have the doc feeder option, so I can't say how well this feature works. It looks like you're going to be doing a lot of scanning, so buy a good scanner. I've had a Microtek scanner for about 5 years and have been very happy with it. They seem to make fairly good ones.