A Brief History of Pocket Scanners
In our latest release, we have introduced the Optical Character Recognition feature or simply OCR. In the modern world, we have no time for pondering and it is so much faster to recognise texts from photos and edit them afterwards instead of typing every symbol by hand.
Still, this did not become a reality in a couple of years — the evolution of mobile scanners took over a century!
Origins of OCR
The modern OCR feature converts photos of typewritten content into digital data. Let’s see how the whole story started and where we are now…
1900s
- Scanning originated in the early 1900s when scientists developed text recognition devices for blind people. The first machine that used this technology was the Fournier d’Albe’s Optophone. This device scanned text and generated time-varying chords of tones from which a blind person could identify letters.
1950s
- The next era for OCR began in the 50s when Optacon appeared. This was a mechanism that enabled blind people to read printed material that have not been transcribed into Braille.
- At the same time, David Shepard created Gismo — a machine that recognised all Latin letters — which later evolved into the Farrington Machine widely used by the US postal services in the 60s to sort mail automatically.
1970s
- At the end of the century, starting from the 70s, it became possible to scan any font. Before that, machines “read” only fonts they were specially designed to recognise. Companies such as Caere Corporation, ABBYY and Kurzweil Computer Products Inc brought different innovations to the OCR technology. For example, Kurzweil developed the first omni-font OCR software, that was capable of reading any text document!
2000s
- Since year 2000, text recognition became so widespread that we can now use this feature online for free! And the latest tech innovations such as neural networks or machine learning don’t stay still, so scanning documents has become a productivity tool available on smartphones!
The popular demand for getting text contents from photos didn’t allow the Collabio team to sleep well until we added this feature in our app. We wanted to offer you a true mobile office experience!
Convenience of Pocket Scanners
Can you recall the times when separate devices for scanning were needed? It was great if they were not bulky, but we still had to move everything around to fit the scanner on the table.
Today, we can enjoy the freedom provided by mobile devices and apps. You can choose from a variety of stand-alone applications that help you to scan text or images using your phone camera.
At Collabio, we went further and added a scanner to our office suite features to help you instantly edit content and do whatever you need with it. Now you don’t need a separate app for scanning anymore. Also, the text will be editable and ready to use right after you take a photo and recognise the contents!
How to Use OCR in Collabio
Let’s see how to use the scanning feature in Collabio.
- In a text document, click on the “+” button to start new scanning and choose the Scan Text option:
2. Point the camera at the document, take its photo and wait for the app to say that it’s ready. You can save the photo and continue, or reshoot it.
Select the area of contents for recognition by pulling the corners of the frame.
The app will transform all your photos into the text or images.
3. To make the results look good, you can edit your photos. Tap the images in the lower-left corner and see the toolbar for editing. In this menu, you can choose to trim, enhance (choose color, grayscale, black and white or photo format), rotate the image, as well as move it to the bin. Once you’re ready, click Save and choose the format:
- Insert as text
- Insert as image
Excellent! Now you have your editable text in the Collabio text editor. See, how simple it is and you know what to do now. Try it out on your iPhone or iPad!
Aren’t you a Collabio user yet? Get it on the App Store and experience the power of the office multi-tool in your device!
