Can visual zone OCR read non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)?

Yes, though the level of support varies meaningfully between vendors, and it's a genuinely important capability for any business processing documents from a broad range of countries rather than just one region.

Identity documents from different parts of the world use very different scripts: Cyrillic for many countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Arabic script across much of the Middle East and North Africa, Hebrew in Israeli documents, Greek for Greek-issued IDs, and various other scripts depending on the issuing country. A document scanning solution that only recognizes Latin characters simply can't process a meaningful share of the world's ID documents, which matters a lot for any business serving an internationally diverse customer base, whether that's a hotel chain, an international bank, or a global e-commerce platform doing age verification.

Handling these scripts well requires OCR models specifically trained on each one, since the character shapes, spacing conventions, and even reading direction (right-to-left for Arabic and Hebrew) differ substantially from Latin text. It's not simply a matter of pointing a general OCR engine at a different alphabet and expecting good results.

Alongside script recognition, transliteration often comes into play: converting a name written in, say, Cyrillic or Arabic script into a Latin-character representation that approximates how the name sounds, since many downstream systems (databases, compliance checks, forms) expect Latin-character input regardless of the document's original script. This is a genuinely tricky problem on its own, since transliteration conventions aren't always fully standardized and can vary somewhat between countries and even between different transliteration systems used for the same language.

Given the practical importance of this capability, it's a reasonable question to ask any vendor directly: which scripts and languages does their visual zone OCR actually support, and how many document types have been trained and tested for each.

ScanDoc's visual zone OCR is built to support multiple scripts, including Latin, Cyrillic, and other common alphabets found across the document types in its coverage, with transliteration handling included so extracted names arrive in a consistent, usable format regardless of the document's original script.