User Guide
Form Types
Introduction
Form Types
What is a form?
A form is a document with blank spaces to be filled in with par
ticulars before it is executed. These blank spaces are called fields and
are usually provided with explanations or captions that tell people
what kind of information and in what format is to be entered into
each particular field.
Forms are used whenever information must be collected from a
large number of people. Government bodies in particular make wide
use of all sorts of forms. In Russia, for example, forms are extensively
used by the Tax Ministry and the Pension Fund. The former collects
and processes
tax returns
filled in by hand and the latter collects
social security forms.
.
Forms are also widely used in business. Insurance companies,
for example, have to handle thousands of insurance applications
and insurance claims, marketing agencies have to deal with opin
ion polls and customer surveys, and educational institutions make
extensive use of forms in all sorts of examinations and formalized
tests. The banking industry also uses forms when issuing credit
cards or handing out loans to their clients. There are also mail
orders, coupons, medical forms, utility bills and many more the list
is practically endless.
In the course of our lives we fill in hundreds of forms applica
tion forms, questionnaires, insurance claims, etc. At the same time
computers have become indispensable for collecting and managing
information, making the task of extracting data from printed docu
ments even more pressing.
This White Paper presents an overview of the existing data cap
ture technologies used to extract handprinted text from completed
forms and explains in detail the principles behind ABBYY
FormReader, a data capture solution that is used to process forms in
more than 30 countries.
Different types of paper form.