The power from Survey123 up to this point comes from the chance to design and to incorporate many types of fields to capture information from many sources on the field: text, numbers, dates, points, areas, polygons, lines, photographs and also information from barcodes of any type, including QRs, are available to be part of a designed form for almost any activity over the planet and on almost any language, most of them go directly to the devise been used (keying, scanning, using a GPS and the device´s camera) and come from the observation of the user on the field.
Nevertheless, it is time where there is a need to capture information steel on paper (printed or hand written) because until today, the dream of a paperless office is still waiting its turn, especially in the under and developing part of the planet, where it is valid to say, first world technology is already in use.
Some of these are the reasons why some enterprises like Cardiff Software and Xerox, among others at some point in time, developed software to automate Data Capture using mainly character recognition engines for data coming from OCR, OMR, ICR, etc., very powerful ended for applications that needed to use a paper format, because of multiple circumstances. Those forms designed for the same system, were available also as digital formats at the same time. I remember PDF plus Forms, as part of a platform back then.
As an early user of Survey123, I came across an application we are using to control the delivery of Resolutions and Acts, resulting from the regulatory activities of the governmental Agency I work for. Well, those Resolutions and Acts, among other documents, are to be delivered and notified on time to the end users, to comply with the law and by far signed and on paper, and for the process to be valid, the user must sign on the copy as a proof of being notified.
On those documents there are elements at this moment, been captured on the field, by keying on the designed fields of the application to register the needed information and sometimes in places where security is questionable. Here is where we can use data capture as mentioned to facilitate reading that data to feed those fields, by scanning the place on the document and recognizing the characters with any of those engines. (Examples of the information: Resolution Number, Date, type of resolution, priority level, name of the end user, address including coordinates previously incorporated to the customer file, to facilitate delivery of information during a process.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_optical_character_recognition_software
