Once the desired language(s) have been activated, the user can create zones within the page(s) to be recognized. Zones are optional. A page does not have to have zones in order to be recognized. An OCR document may have a single page or multiple pages. Zones can be added to pages as follows:

1.

Manually: This is done by adding one or more zones to a specific OCR page using AddZone.

2.

Automatically: All zones on a specific page can be found by calling FindZones. This method runs an algorithm that automatically determines the zones for the page and adds the zones it finds to the OCR document page. The options that control the algorithm used by this method can be set using ZoneParser, EnableZoneForceSingleColumn and ShowZoneGridLines properties. These options should be set before calling FindZones.

General Zone methods:

LEADTOOLS provides other properties that can be used with zones, regardless of how the zones were created. GetZoneCount gets the total number of zones in the zone list for the specified OCR page, while GetZoneCount gets general zone information for a specific zone in a specific OCR page.

The zone list for a specific page may be saved to a file for later use, or for use with a different OCR document. To save a zone list to a file, call ExportZones. To import a zone list that has been saved using ExportZones, call ImportZones.

To update the zone data of a single zone in the zone list of a specific page, call UpdateZone.

Finally, a zone may be removed from a zone list for a specific page by calling RemoveZone.