User Guide

Previously we divided all forms into two large classes  those with
rigidly structured fields and those with "flexible" or "floating"
fields.
Structured forms are best processed using form templates,
whereas unstructured forms require a different approach. ABBYY
has developed a method for capturing data from unstructured
forms that delivers the same level of quality as obtained with
structured forms. The method consists in analysing the "logical"
structure of unstructured forms and is called FlexiCapture.
The program will analyse the form and determine the location of
fields and the type of data in these fields relying on the informa
tion about the form's structure provided by the user. Suppose you
want the program to find the SSN fields on the forms and capture
information from these fields. In the template you will specify that
the letters SSN are located to the left of the field, and the field
itself consists of a particular number of character spaces (the
number of digits in an SSN is known in advance). The program
will easily find these letters on the forms and read information
from the fields in question. This method of analysing geometri
cally indeterminate document structures is called Intelligent Field
Recognition, or IFR.
ABBYY has developed a language that can be used to describe the
structure of almost any form currently in use. This is a much more
powerful tool than the traditional templates for structured forms.
ABBYY's FlexiCapture technology is currently used by more than
500 Russian banks to capture data from payment documents.
ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio is a powerful data capture application
that allows users to create form descriptions without writing pro
gram code. Any advanced user can master the program's interface
and learn to create form descriptions.
The user "teaches" FlexiCapture Studio to look for particular fields
on the form. To achieve this goal, a formalized description of each
field is created in FlexiCapture Studio  fields are described
through their various parameters and surrounding objects, such as
captions, images, separators, blank spaces, etc. The program will
use this description to find the best match. This description is
tested on a large number of forms, and then adjusted and entered
into ABBYY FormReader or ABBYY FineReader Engine as any
template.
Processing "flexible" forms
Using ABBYY Technologies to Solve Untypical Tasks