Parsing stocklists from vendors

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I have been advised that what I need is a system of template or scanned document parsing.

I am in lumber sales. We receive a number of stocklists via fax from our vendors. I am looking for a way to scan these lists and when an inquiry for a specific product comes to our office, then enter my search parameters and have the software find all of the offerings, preferrably first by item, then vendor then, email address and/or phone number. I have an HP Officejet 8500pro scanner, printer.

Does anyone know of a product that would accomplish this kind of task.

Posted 24-Oct-11 8:47am

Hayden Price

Updated 24-Oct-11 9:00am

Bala Selvanayagam

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Mehdi Gholam · Answer 1 · 2011-10-24T19:34:00

First you need an OCR to convert your images into something that is machine comprehend-able.

Most office scanners have this capability and save to PDF usually.

Secondly you need to extract contextual information from these PDF files, this can be done with a IFilter type of component which will give you text.

Having said all this you will probably have to go through all this by hand as there are a lot of things that can go wrong like skewed faxes, gibberish OCR output etc.

Your best options is to setup a web site and have your other parties use that to input data instead of sending faxes.