01
Where this one gets misread
OCR errors do not announce themselves. A misread figure or date flows into an answer and a citation that both look entirely correct, and the only way to catch it is to open the page.
Glossary
What is optical character recognition (OCR)?
Optical character recognition turns text in an image or scan into machine-readable characters. Whatever it gets wrong is carried into every later step.
Updated 21 Aug 2026
02
Questions to ask
Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.
- What is the character error rate on your worst scans?
- How are low-confidence regions marked?
- Is the original page viewable beside the extracted text?
- What happens with handwriting, stamps and marginalia?
03
How Marella uses the term
We use “Optical character recognition (OCR)” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.
- Backed by a product mechanism or an evaluation method
- Deployment differences flagged
What this page does not prove
- B1A definition is not a claim about how the product performs.
- B2Vendor implementations vary.
- B3Test the term against a representative workflow.
Related pages
Test the claim on your documents
Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.