> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://sensible.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Extracting handwriting and OCR text

This topic contains tips and tricks for extracting handwriting and OCR'd text, for example from scanned documents or images:

### OCR tips

Sensible provides confidence scores for OCR'd text in the extraction when you configure high [verbosity](/senseml-reference/config-settings/verbosity), so you know whether the extracted output comes from high- or low-quality text images. For document types that use OCR, write [validations](/best-practices/validate-extractions) to warn you about extractions from low-quality scans.

### Handwriting tips

* **Choosing an OCR engine:** Choose Google OCR. To configure OCR, click the gear icon for the Document Type and select **Google**:\
  ![Click to enlarge](https://mintlify.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sensible/assets/v0/images/screenshots/merge_lines_ocr_1.png)
* **Defining regions:** Handwriting can occupy an unpredictable region or even overlap other lines. To capture handwriting, Sensible recommends defining a [region](/senseml-reference/methods/region) with a small height and long width that runs through the middle of the area that can contain the handwriting. The green boxes in the following image show this approach:\
  ![Click to enlarge](https://mintlify.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sensible/assets/v0/images/screenshots/handwriting_1.png)\
  For more information about how Sensible determines whether to extract a line that partially overlaps a region, see [Region](/senseml-reference/methods/region).
* **Correcting for vertical misalignment:** Jitter in the vertical positions of handwritten lines can cause Sensible to incorrectly sort lines that a human reader interprets as following left to right. The Sort Lines parameter corrects this problem by sorting lines by their likely reading order. For more information, see [Sort Lines example](/senseml-reference/field-query-object/method#sort-line-example).