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So far, you have described the Invoice Number, Invoice Date, and Delivery Address fields. Now decide the order in which to detect the other elements. To detect the Country field, you can use the field name and a Character String element. To detect the Total Quantity and Total Amount fields, you need more than the name that the two fields share. The names of the corresponding table columns help here.

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Plan the search for the Invoice Table field

Prepare to search for the Invoice Table field, which a Table element detects.
  1. Describe the header of the table. You can detect column names in two ways:
    • Specify one or more keywords in the Column Properties dialog box (open the Table element’s Properties dialog box and click the Columns tab). This method is quick but not very flexible.
    • Use a previously detected element as a reference to find the column name’s location. This method takes full advantage of the additional element settings.
    The pre-recognition quality is good enough to use the first method. The one difficulty is the very short name of the Quantity column. Because the keyword Qty has only three letters, a 20% error tolerance effectively allows no errors. Use the first method for the first two columns, Reference and Designation, and use previously described elements for the rest: Quantity, Unit Price, and Total. You must create these elements anyway to detect the Total Quantity and Total Amount fields.
  2. Describe the footer of the table. You can describe it with keywords or with an auxiliary element. On some images the footer keywords also occur in the first table row, so use an auxiliary element to restrict the search area.
  3. Describe the table search area. After describing the header and footer, describe the right boundary of the table. The left boundary needs no description, because there is no other data on that part of the image. Context cannot separate the figures in the Total column from those in the Sales column, so use the name of the last column, Sales, to restrict the search area on the right.
The elements and the order in which they are detected are selected by trial and error, and you can change them during FlexiLayout adjustment.

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Describe the auxiliary elements

Before describing the remaining fields, describe the auxiliary elements. The names of the Quantity, Unit Price, Total, and Sales columns must be detected first. The table header begins with a horizontal separator between the column names and the Invoice Number, Invoice Date, and Delivery Address fields. This separator helps restrict the search areas of the column names. Create a Separator element and name it hsTableHeaderTop. For more information, see Step 14. Next, look for the column names in their natural order. Create a Group element named TableHeader (see Step 15) that includes these elements: Then describe the lower part of the document: the shared name of the Total Quantity and Total Amount fields, which marks the bottom boundary of the table, and any captions that help locate that boundary. Describe the name element and the source element for the Country field in this group too. Create a Group element named Footer that includes these elements:

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Describe the remaining fields

With the preparations done and the creation order decided, look for the remaining fields, using the column names and the Footer you already detected:
  • Create two Character String elements named TotalQuantity and TotalAmount for the Total Quantity and Total Amount fields. For more information, see Step 25.
  • Create a Table element named InvoiceTable for the Invoice Table field. For more information, see Step 26.