scanners and special pre-printed forms with drop-out colors and registration marks. Such forms typically cost US$0.10 to $0.19 a page. In contrast, OMR software users design their own mark-sense forms with a word processor or built-in form editor, print them locally on a printer, and can save thousands of dollars on large numbers of forms.

Identifying optical marks within a form, such as for processing census forms, has been offered by many forms-processing (Batch Transaction Capture) companies since the