Sometimes there is no way to indicate an application with the supplied automation providers. In this case, OCR activities provide an alternative approach.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and provides the ability to read text from images without directly accessing the text field. However, OCR is not only used to read the text from an image, but it can also search a specific text in an image and click or hover over it. Additionally, it is possible to wait for specific text to appear or to vanish with OCR.
| Activity | Description |
|---|---|
| Get Text by Anchor | Get the text of a defined area related to an anchor. |
| OCR Click | Click on the specified text. |
| Hover Text | Hover over the specific text. |
| Wait Text Appear | Waits a defined time for a certain text to appear (base of a decision). |
| Wait Text Vanish | Waits a defined time for a certain text to vanish (base of a decision). |
| Get Text From PDF with OCR | Returns the text of a PDF by using optical character recognition |
All OCR activities provide you the opportunity to change the OCR Engine activity. The Engine offers and executes the actual OCR methodology. Hyland RPA provides the Tesseract Engine activity inside the OCR activities as default. The user is free, however, to choose a different (custom) OCR engine. The OCR activity itself is responsible for providing the engine the required image from which it must read the specific text and execute the desired action. Below you can see the OCR Click activity with and without the Tesseract Engine activity.
Above you can see the OCR Click Activity with and without the Tesseract Engine Activity
Anchor Image
Speaking of the provided image, with all OCR Activities the user must set an anchor region and the region where the specific text is expected. We demonstrate this methodology with the following picture:
The upper dotted line represents the anchor image to which the OCR Activity is directed. It will search for the image HYLAND first. The lower dotted line is the area we want to read out with OCR.