How do I develop an OCR software that recognizes specific forms?

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I perform a lot of data entry at work, which is time consuming and tedius.

I want to make OCR software that can recognize recurring forms that I routinely see, for example a tax return. I want the software to recognize numbers in fields/areas I specify and return the numbers to an excel form that I have already created.

I envision the process to be, scan the document, make it a ?pdf?, I choose the type of scanned document from a list of templates I have created, software extracts the numbers I have specified based on the template selected, the extracted numbers are placed into an excel document in an order I specify based on the OCR template.

I have no programming experience beyond creating macros in excel. I'm self-taught on that and I'm willing to learn if I can be shown where to read or look. I have no issue making this a 3-6 month learning project that gets me into coding. I have nothing but time on my hands if this will save me hours and hours and all my coworkers become jealous.

Posted 14-Jan-14 12:49pm

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ledtech3 · Answer 1 · 2014-01-14T15:03:00

A problem I see with that is if it dosen't correctly reconize the input then your data will be wrong.

I recently tried to scan data to notepad and it got confused on the font for "k" and other letters and symbols.

You could start with something like this to give you an idea on the scale of the project.
Find and look at some of the current API's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_optical_character_recognition_software[^]