Jul 15, 2017 No more manual retyping or reformatting. Instead you can search, share, archive, and copy information from documents for reuse and quotation — saving you time, effort and hassles. No more manual retyping or reformatting. Instead you can search, share, archive, and copy information from documents for reuse and quotation — saving you time, effort and hassles.
ABBYY FineReader Professional is a powerful program that lets you convert your scanned documents and image files into Word, PDF, or other formats. Scan items directly, or use files you already have saved on your computer, and once the program has done its work, you'll be able to search and edit them with ease.
Pros
Excellent interface: This app features a smooth and streamlined interface that makes its features accessible to users of all experience levels. Large buttons denote the various actions you can carry out, including Scan to Word, Scan to PDF, Image to PDF, and Quick Open, among others. The program walks you through the process of initiating the scan, adding pages, and completing the process nicely, and once the recognition phase is completed, your new document will open automatically.
Selection options: In addition to Word and PDF output options, you can also select from several other useful formats. Scan to ePUB, and Scan to HTML are options listed under the More tab, and you can also choose to save scans as images and then convert them later to either Word or PDF.
Cons
Complicated installation: The installation process for this app was long and a bit confusing. There were multiple steps, and instructions weren't always clear about what to do next. There was a Help manual, which explained things clearly, but it didn't seem like it should be necessary to consult the Help document just to open the app. Installation also took nearly 15 minutes to complete.
Frequent mistakes: Even in a very basic page of a document, there were still several errors, most of them involving letters being substituted for numbers. These seemed to happen when the font was slightly different in certain areas, and although some errors are understandable and expected, it doesn't bode well for the results of this recognition technology working on more complex documents.
Bottom Line
ABBYY FineReader Professional provides a valuable service, especially if you often have to work with scanned documents. It will always require you to go back and edit the documents it produces, but depending on the types of documents you're working with, these edits may not be extensive. The free trial is good for 30 days or 100 pages, whichever comes first, and it only allows you to save three pages at a time. The full version costs $169.99.
Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of ABBYY FineReader Professional 12.
What do you need to know about free software?
Below follows a brief overview of the major new features and improvements that have been introduced in ABBYY FineReader 12.
Improved recognition accuracy
The new version of ABBYY FineReader delivers more accurate OCR and better recreates the original formatting of your documents thanks to improvements in ABBYY's proprietary Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ADRT). The program now better detects document styles, headings, and tables, so that you don't have to fix the formatting of your documents once they are recognized.
Recognition languages
ABBYY FineReader 12 can now recognize Russian texts with stress marks. OCR quality has been improved for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Faster and friendlier user interface
- Background processing
It may take quite some time to recognize very large documents. In the new version, time-consuming processes run in the background, allowing you to continue working on those parts of the document which have already been recognized. Now you don't have to wait for the OCR process to complete before you can adjust image areas, view non-recognized pages, force-start the OCR of a particular page or image area, add pages from other sources, or change the order of pages in the document.
- Faster image loading
Page images will appear in the program as soon as you scan the paper originals, so that you can immediately see the scanning results and select pages and image areas to recognize.
- Easier quoting
Any image area containing text, pictures or tables can be easily recognized and copied to the Clipboard with a click of the mouse.
- All the basic operations, including scrolling and zooming, are now also supported on touchscreens.
Image preprocessing and camera OCR
The improved image preprocessing algorithms ensure better recognition of photographed texts and produce text photos that look as good as scans. The new photo correction capabilities include automatic cropping, correction of geometrical distortions, and evening out of brightness and background colors.
ABBYY FineReader 12 allows you to select the preprocessing options you wish to apply to any newly added image, so that you won't need to correct each image separately.
Better visual quality for archived documents
ABBYY FineReader 12 includes new PreciseScan technology, which smoothes characters to improve the visual quality of scanned documents. As a result, characters do not look pixelated even when you zoom in on the page.
New tools for manual editing of recognition output
Verification and correction capabilities have been expanded in the new version. In ABBYY FineReader 12, you can format recognized texts in the verification window, which now also includes a tool for inserting special symbols not available on standard keyboards. You can also use keyboard shortcuts for the most frequent verification and correction commands.
In ABBYY FineReader 12, you can disable recreation of such structural elements as headers, footers, footnotes, tables of contents, and numbered lists. This may be necessary if you want these elements to appear as normal text for better compatibility with other products, e.g. translation software and e-book authoring software.
New saving options
- When saving OCR results to XLSX, you can now save pictures, remove text formatting, and save each page on a separate Excel worksheet.
- ABBYY FineReader 12 can create ePub files compliant with the EPUB 2.0.1 and EPUB 3.0 standards.
Improved integration with third-party services and applications
Abbyy Finereader 12 Mac Manual Download
Now you can export your recognized documents directly to SharePoint Online and Microsoft Office 365, and the new opening and saving dialog boxes provide easy access to cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and SkyDrive.