Thanks for the link Victor. That's the general impression I've got from my research. In this case, the forms are being collected at various ports of entry into a country and there can be no "training" of the OCR software to be able to read someone's handwriting, so it doesn't look like this will work either.

Having said that, there must besome way of achieving this as one of the competitiors is offering it.

More research to do...

>>Hi,
>>
>>My client wants to be able to scan in some forms that have been hand filled in and let the data be automatically put into the appropriate fields in a database. Has anyone any experience of this, or any idea how feasible it is?
>>
>>Currently a data entry clerk can put in 1500 of these forms a day so we won't be wanting to move to a slower less accurate solution.
>>
>>Thanks.
>
>I've only heard of one such product - and it doesn't work if the letters are connected. As matter of fact - I haven't seen too much OCR's of anykind that I'm all that impressed with.
>Anyway if you wanna give this one a try its here:
>http://www.aptrio.com/Business/Applications/softwriting-8220.html