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Search areas are specified on the Search Constraints tab in the Properties dialog box, which is displayed whenever you create a new element. To open the Properties dialog box of an existing element, do one of the following:
  • Right-click the element in the FlexiLayout tree and select Properties… on the shortcut menu.
  • Double-click the element in the FlexiLayout tree.
Screenshot of the Search Constraints tab of the element Properties dialog box in ABBYY FlexiLayout Studio, showing the search area and constraint options.

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Specify the absolute coordinates of a search area

Open the Properties dialog box for an element, click the Search Constraints tab, and select the Absolute search area constraints option. For a multi-page document, you can specify the pages on which to search for an element by selecting one of the following five options from the Pages drop-down list: All, Even, Odd, Last, or Range. If you select Range, enter the numbers of the pages, separating them with commas, and specify a page range using a hyphen: 2, 4, 6-8, 15. You can define the absolute coordinates of a search area in the Region field. Enter the coordinates in the format [left, top, right, bottom]. You can specify the coordinates of several rectangles in this field. Use the Measure tool to determine the absolute coordinates of objects. Once you have specified the properties of the search area, click Add…. The search area appears in the Search areas list. To edit a search area, enter the values in the Pages list or in the Region field and click Replace. If the Region field is empty, FlexiLayout Studio searches for the element across the entire page range.

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Exclude an element from the search area

The Exclude regions of elements property lets you exclude from the search area the region of the hypothesis found for an element. If no hypothesis for an excluded element is generated, this constraint does not affect the search area of the element.
An exception occurs when additional constraints are specified for some of the boundaries of the hypothesis for an excluded element in the Advanced pre-search relations pane. In this case, if the program fails to find the excluded element, it cuts out the rectangular search area of this element from the surrounding search area. For more information about internal rectangles, see Fuzzy rectangle.
To exclude an element’s region from the search area, click the Add… button next to Exclude regions of elements. In the Select Element to Exclude dialog box, select the element whose region must be excluded from the search area.

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Recognize vertical text

For the Currency, Date, Phone, Character String, Static Text, and Paragraph elements, the Search through vertical text option is available. It enables recognition of both horizontally and vertically oriented text.
Vertically oriented text is a line of text that has been rotated 90 degrees left or right. Text fragments where the letters are placed one under the other but retain their normal reading orientation are not detected as vertical.
The following example shows a line of vertically oriented text detected by a Static Text element.
Screenshot of the FlexiLayout Studio Image window showing a StaticText element matched on a line of vertically-oriented text reading VERTICAL TEXT that has been rotated 90 degrees, alongside non-vertical text that is not detected.
You can use the Clockwise oriented and Counterclockwise oriented options to enable or disable the recognition of vertical text from top to bottom and from bottom to top respectively. These are enabled by default and can only be disabled if Search through vertical text is selected.
Screenshot of the Search Constraints tab of the element Properties dialog box, where the Search through vertical text option is selected with its Clockwise oriented and Counterclockwise oriented suboptions enabled.