OCR, Optical Character Recognition is a software process to create readable text from a scanned image. The results can be used in many ways such as searchable PDF files, free text indexing for Alchemy databases or for importing into applications such as Word and Excel.

In its more advanced form OCR is used to capture data from supplier invoices to reduce the amount of manual keying of data into a purchase ledger system. 

A further variation is ICR, Intelligent Character Recognition, which is used to capture hand written text from documents such as application forms.