Question:
I am a bit confused by the distinction between OCR by itself and character recognition in a forms processing program. Are these two separate things?

Answer:
The same type of technology is used in both OCR tools and forms processing tools, but forms processing takes it a step further. Optical character recognition is used to make documents text-searchable and editable. Forms processing tools also recognize the text within a document, but the program is also set up to recognize data fields and extract the relevant text from each section, putting it into a more convenient format for the user. Both rely on character recognition technology. If you are looking for a basic OCR solution, you can try CVISION’s Maestro Recognition Server.

Download the free trial version of Maestro below:

http://www.cvisiontech.com/download_main.html