What software do you use Ted? That sounds appealing. I have been messing with this. I would love have an OCR to database setup. I have some uaecasea at work.
https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ Patrick ---- On Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:02:16 -0800 Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote --- > Followup on the "handwritten forms" > > If you are able to convert these forms into a multiple-choice form that > people fill in boxes by hand, instead of writing actual words on them, I can > Tell you how to convert these into actual data output. At my office we have > this customer satisfaction survey thing that we do periodically, and > For a zillion unrelated reasons it has to be handed out on paper. The > department doing it was wringing their hands over this as it would take > Hours and hours and hours for some poor soul to go through all of the forms > and input the results into a spreadsheet. > > I looked into commercial products that do this - and there's only 1 company > out there that sells software nowadays for this - Tungsten Automation. > These turkeys have been spending the last decade buying up every company in > the "hybrid paper workflows" market and they now have a complete monopoly on > it - and literally they sell complete systems, they no longer sell > standalone software that does forms conversions. Pricing is quote-only and > it's in the low 5 figures. > > I found an open source software program for this and built a system around > it - so now, they just feed the 300 or so paper surveys into the hopper in a > scanner like what I just linked to, and all the resulting PDF's get fed into > the system and the data is then loaded into a MariaDB database. I then took > their Excel spreadsheet and converted it into a front end using the ODBC > drivers for MariaDB. Works slick saves hours of drudgery. > > Anyway, this is only good for multiple choice click box forms that people > fill out by hand. For OCR of cursive or handwritten printing - good effing > luck. > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of VY > Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 4:47 AM > To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help, civil and on-topic > <[email protected]> > Subject: [PLUG] document scanner > > Dear All > > I am looking for a good document scanner that is Linux compatible. Better > yet if it is Raspberry Pi compatible. > > I have a bunch of forms that have hand writing on them. I will be getting > them on a regular basis and I like to scan them and convert them to > high-resolution PDFs. > > Any pointer for such a scanner is much appreciated. > > -Vincent > >
