Control OCR and image preparation
The OCR Settings that decide how scans become searchable text — the master switch, advanced image preparation's speed-for-accuracy trade, the barcode engine choice — and the restart habit that makes changes stick.
At the end of this guide you'll know which switch governs each part of the scan-to-searchable pipeline, the one trade-off setting worth testing on your own documents, and the restart habit that guarantees changes actually take effect.
Everything lives in Administration > System Settings > Capture Settings (in the Capture & Conversion group), mostly under the OCR Settings subcategory.
The OCR Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable OCR and auto-rotate | The master switch: captured images get text recognition and upside-down pages get righted. Off, scans arrive as unsearchable pictures — on is the answer for almost everyone |
| Use advanced image preparation | The trade-off worth testing — its own description states it: "Enabling this option may slow capture speed, but boost accuracy for documents w/ color backgrounds." Shaded forms, colored paper, highlighter-happy offices: try it on |
| Enable 2 pass OCR processing | A second recognition pass for accuracy at more processing cost |
| Store OCR in database | Marked "Not recommended" by its own description — leave it unless support says otherwise |
| Barcode engine | Which engine reads barcodes during capture: the Ademero Barcode Engine ("the engine Content Central has always used" — every existing zone and QCard was set up against it) or Cortexa BarVision, built to recover barcodes "the current engine cannot read — faint or heavy print, skew, speckle and damage." Struggling barcodes are the reason to switch; test your QCards and zones after |
The neighbors that shape image capture
In the Image-Capture Settings subcategory alongside: Enable blank-page removal (with Remove pages smaller than (bytes)) — the duplex-scanning essential that drops empty backsides; Generate PDF/A-1b PDF documents for archival-format shops; capture throttling and processing-thread counts for tuning server load. And under PDF Electronic Capture, Use existing text in PDFs skips re-OCR when an uploaded PDF already carries a text layer — "Improves capture performance," accurately.
The restart habit
After changing settings here, restart the Ademero Content Central Capture Service (on the server, in Windows Services). Some of these settings apply live; at least one — advanced image preparation — quietly doesn't until the service restarts, and the settings page won't always tell you which is which. One restart after a settings session costs a minute and removes the whole question.
Success check: capture a test scan after your changes — it arrives searchable (search finds its text), right-side-up, minus its blank pages. For the advanced-image-prep decision, run the same difficult document through both ways and compare the extracted text — your documents are the only benchmark that matters.