Welcome to the sixth of 31 applications we will post (in addition to the contest participants' submissions). Make sure you add this blog to your RSS / Atom feed and check the gallery for summaries of all the apps as they are released.

This app is a frivolous way to solve the general problem "how do I detect and act on the content of a scanned document"?

If you've seen the movie Office Space, you're well aware that all TPS reports are required to have a specific cover sheet.  I've written an application that does two things - first, given a folder it will find all TIFF documents within the folder and flag any TIFF wherein the first page is NOT a TPS cover sheet.  The second thing the application does is to insert a TPS cover sheet into files that are missing one.

The first task is simple, if you have the right pieces at your fingertips.  Using the Tesseract OCR engine, I recognize the first page in each document and attempt to match text on the page via a regular expression.  If there is a match, then the document has a TPS report cover sheet. 

The second task uses our new TiffDocument class to add in the cover sheet.  Because of this class, this task is literally a one-liner.

While this particular application is frivolous, you could imagine using the same structure to auto-sort documents that come in from a fax source or do keyword searching.

You can download an installer for the app here.

You can download the source here.

 About Atalasoft's 31 Apps in 31 Days