Pages with multiple columns are a common entity. You find them in newspapers, books, trade journals and reports, to name a few. It is important to identify the columns through zoning if, after OCR, you intend to search on the data (e.g., using a fuzzy search engine on the data after it has been stored in a database) or if you need to preserve the look and feel of the original page. If you perform a search without separating the columns, hyphenated words that wrap to multiple lines won’t be found. Similarly, without column separation, 2 columns of text on the same line will appear as a single line in a word processor.
