Associating optical character recognition text data with source images

A method for associating optical character recognition text data with source images in an electronic document, comprising:

• receiving text data from an optical character recognition engine, the text data being obtained from a source image by the optical character recognition engine, where the entire source image is duplicated on more than one page of the electronic document and a plurality of times on at least one page of the electronic document;
• outputting a document specification defining a fixed-layout document, the document specification including multiple image references to the entire source image is duplicated on more than one page of the electronic document and a plurality of times on at least one page of the electronic document, where each image reference of the multiple image references refers to a same image file of the source image stored in memory on a computing system and where each image reference of the multiple image references is configured to cause a viewer application to render an instance of the entire source image as part of the fixed-layout document each time the image reference appears in the document;
• associating the text data with the source image;
• and
• outputting associated optical character recognition data including the source image, the text data associated with the source image, and a plurality of referrers, each referrer of the plurality of referrers indicating a different image reference of the multiple image references, and where outputting the document specification includes outputting the document specification further defining transparent text data to be overlaid on each instance of the entire source image that is rendered as part of the fixed-layout document;
• wherein the plurality of referrers are configured to cause the viewer application to output the text data associated with the source image to each instance of the entire source image that is rendered as part of the fixed-layout document in accordance with the multiple image references, and wherein the plurality of referrers are configured to cause the viewer application to output the text data as the transparent text data for selection by a user.

A method for rendering a fixed-layout document, the method comprising:

• receiving a document specification defining a fixed-layout document, the document specification including multiple image references to a source image of associated optical character recognition data, where the entire source image is duplicated on more than one page of the electronic document and a plurality of times on at least one page of the document, where each image reference of the multiple image references refers to the same image file of the source image stored in memory on a computing system and where each image reference of the multiple image references is configured to cause a viewer application to render an instance of the entire source image as part of the fixed-layout document each time the image reference appears in the document, and where the document specification defines transparent text data to be overlaid on each instance of the entire source image that is rendered as part of the fixed-layout document;
• the associated optical character recognition data including the source image, text data associated with the source image, and a plurality of referrers, each referrer of the plurality of referrers indicating a different image reference of the multiple image references;
• rendering an instance of the entire source image as part of the fixed-layout document for each image reference of the multiple image references by retrieving the source image from the associated optical character recognition data for each image reference of the multiple image references;
• and
• outputting the text data associated with the source image to each instance of the entire source image that is rendered as part of the fixed-layout document by retrieving the text data from the associated optical character recognition data as indicated by the plurality of referrers, wherein the plurality of referrers are configured to cause the viewer application to output the text data as the transparent text data for selection by a user.