Search
Welcome to M-Files Empower – our new support experience. We'd love to hear what you think!Give feedback
Home/Support and troubleshooting/Troubleshooting/FAQ/General questions

Measurement Units for Zones of OCR Value Sources Definitions

Last updated on 27 February 2021

Admin
M-Files OCR

Overview

You can define metadata property values to be read with optical character recognition (OCR) when importing documents to M-Files with Connections for External Sources/File Sources. See user's guide about defining an OCR value sources:

Defining an OCR Value Source

If you want to read the property data with OCR from the certain areas of the document, you can define zones within a page from where to read the data. Placements and dimensions of these zones can be defined either with pixels, inches or centimeters. Although pixels are a default measurement unit, in most of the cases it is better to use inches and centimeters.

Solution

With pixels as a measurement unit for zones, it can be difficult to achieve exact measurements as pixel size is not a physical unit of length, it depends on the resolution of a device. Instead of pixels it is easier to use either inches or millimeters. With inches you can use two decimal precision, and with millimeters one decimal precision, so very precise measurements are possible.

One suitable tool for measuring the zone positions and dimensions is Adobe Acrobat Reader and its measuring tool. Have your document stored as a PDF, open it with Acrobat Reader and with measuring tool, you can measure exact positions and dimensions for zones in centimeters or inches. You can change measurement unit in Acrobat Reader with Edit -> Preferences -> Units.

Still need help?

On this page