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ABBYY FlexiCapture
Dynamic Data Capture System
© 2011 ABBYY. All rights reserved.
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Print Quality
When you print blank forms, keep in mind the following requirements:
1. The forms must be printed either professionally or using a printer. We recommend that color forms be printed professional-
ly. If this is impossible, test the form color on a scanner before starting your print run.
2. All the copies of the form must be printed using the same source document, as the field location on each form must be iden-
tical.
3. The minimum margin size (i.e. the distance between the edge of the page and the nearest form element) should be at least 8
mm (12 mm margins are recommended).
4. The permitted linear deviation of form elements is no more than 0.15% ( i.e. 0.5 mm for an А4–size page).
5. If you print your forms using a printer, do not print them with a resolution less than 600 dpi
.
6. We recommend printing the forms with the help of the same printer or different printers of the same model.
Tip. We do not recommend copying machine-readable forms with the help of copying equipment. Use of such equipment can
slightly change dimensions of elements on the form or their arrangement, for example, table or entry fields borders may become thick-
er, or color depth may change, which might be detrimental for recognition quality.
Form Completion
Pens and ink
Forms are best completed neatly, in capital letters, using a black ball–point, gel or capillary pen (dark blue and violet are also accepta-
ble). Soft–tip/felt–tip pens are not to be recommended as characters are likely to be very thick, causing recognition problems. Recog-
nition is worst in the case of forms completed by pencil or using a light ink.
Letter size and style
For best recognition results, forms should be completed in block capital letters. The letters must fill out all character cells but must not
overlap cell borders.
If character cells are visually marked on the forms (i.e. the following text marking types are used: letters in frames, letters in separate
frames), the person filling out the form will be less likely to join the letters together.
The following text marking types present greater problems for recognition: text in a frame with a comb, letters on a comb. Here only
the width of the character cell is predefined, while the absence of side borders makes joining letters together possible. In the case of
the comb without a frame, the letters can be written either too small or too large.
If text in a frame or text over a line are used, there is no evident restriction on the width of the character cells. The letters may be
joined together, which will have an adverse effect on recognition quality. In the case of text over a line there are no restrictions on
character height. Therefore this marking type is not recommended for forms requiring a high degree of recognition accuracy.
Another important requirement is that the letters do not overlap the field borders. This is not so crucial for dropout or black–and–
white raster forms, because field borders will disappear during scanning and despeckling. But if letters overlap field borders on black–
and–white linear forms, this may result in a significant decrease in recognition quality.
Sample
To encourage correct completion, we recommend including a note on your form similar to the one below.