User manual ABBYY SOFTWARE FORMREADER-GUIDE TO CREATE FORMS

[. . . ] ABBYY FormReader Automatic Form Input System A Guide to Creating MachineMachine-Readable Forms ABBYY Software House Moscow 2001 ABBYY Software House A Guide to Creating Machine-Readable Forms Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent any commitment on the part of ABBYY Software House. The document is supplied as a part of the ABBYY FormReader package under a license agreement. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written approval of ABBYY Software House. © ABBYY Software House (BIT Software), 1993-2001. ABBYY, BIT Software, FineReader, "fountain image transformation, " Lingvo, Scan&Read, Scan&Translate, "one button principle, " "Your computer reads by itself, " "Your computer reads and translates by itself" are registered trademarks of ABBYY. [. . . ] Recognition is worst in the case of forms completed by pencil or using a light ink. To encourage correct completion, we recommend to include a note on your form similar to the one below: Creating machine-readable forms Form creation stages Machine-readable form creation is made up of the following stages: 1. Definition of the form content; form approval; and draft form creation. We recommend that the form content be determined before the actual form design process is started. Choice of form type (see "Types of machine-readable forms", page 6 and "How to choose a form type, page 11). Placing the various form elements on the form (see "Elements of machine-readable forms", page 6) a. Placing entry fields on the form During form creation, always abide by the requirements listed under "General requirements for machine-readable forms", page 14. In the following two sections, the process of machine-readable form creation within Microsoft Visio 2000 and Microsoft Word 2000 is discussed in detail. Both packages are ideal for creating forms you are going to use print in your office: with printer or a Xerox machine. If you plan to use dropout forms and have them professionally printed, you will need to perform color separation before handing over the source document to the printing house. In this case we recommend to useCorelDraw as a graphic editor for form creation, as it has built-in color separation tools. You may also prepare a form created in MS Visio for professional printing (see "Preparing an MS Visio form for professional printing " chapter, page 21). Developing forms in Microsoft Visio 2000 (For the purposes of this guide we assume you already have a working knowledge of MS Visio 2000. If this is not the case, please consult the extensive literature, which is available concerning the application. ) In order to facilitate form creation within MS Visio, a set of MS Visio stencils is included in the ABBYY FormReader package (stored in the Elements. vss file). These allow you to determine the appearance of all main form elements, including reference points, background colors, background patterns, and field borders. The stencil list includes only those elements that can enhance recognition quality: · "raster" type (for creating black&white, and red forms), · "white rectangles on gray background" type (these are used for the creation of black&white form with 10% black saturation, and for orange forms). The Elements. vss file (in VisioStencils format) can be found on the ABBYY FormReader CD-Rom. Attaching a stencil set Before the set of stencils provided in the Elements. vss file can be used, it must be incorporated into MS Visio. This can be done in one of two ways: · Copy the Elements. vss file into a folder on your computer and open it in MS Visio (File>Open). · Open the Solutions folder located in the folder containing MS Visio in (the default location is C:\Program Files\Visio\). The stencil file will be automatically incorporated into MS Visio i. e. it will be included in the list of available stencils (MS Visio (Stencil)). To open the file, select the File>Stencil menu item and then click on the folder created. The form elements provided by the stencil Once you've incorporated the set of stencils into MS Visio and selected the Elements item, a list of the most popular form elements will appear on the screen (the location of the elements window and its appearance can be altered by clicking the respective icon in the main MS Visio window toolbar): The following form elements can be included on a form using the Elements stencil: 1. Field (Black Raster) ­ a standard one-line raster field with a raster size of 0. 39 pt; raster color - black (100%). [. . . ] The barcode line direction should coincide with form page orientation, and the forms should be scanned in the same direction as that of the barcode bars. Barcodes located on different form pages as well as on forms of different types should always differ in value, and only then can they be used as form identifiers. 3) Static text The text should be clear and legible, and present no problems to an OCR system. . Static text identifiers should be lines set in a plain monospaced font (without any stylization) and no less than 8 mm in size. [. . . ]