Optical character recognition includes reading, verification, and checking print quality. The adjoining image utilizes all three areas of OCR. The top line is checked to make sure that it printed completely. The date is compared in second line the to the date that is know by the vision processor. This is called verification. The third line is a sequence number and each character is read and the charters are converted to a numerical value. I choose this example because it demonstrates the most common problem with a successful OCR system, the printing. In this case the date is a problem in that the print system only prints the charters required for the day of year. Because of this a check must be made to insure that an extra character is not printed. A better solution would be to print leading zeros for the day of year if needed. Also the font that utilizes equal spacing for all characters would be a better choice. Alcock Consulting is ready to assist your company in planning and implementing your OCR project.