 "Review: ABBYY Finereader 10")
Imagine having documents piled up dating back a decade, and you now need to dig up something important. Searching manually through a pile of thousands can be tedious and stressful. Also, storing these paper documents requires lots of space. So why not convert your documents into a digital searchable and editable format so they can be neatly cataloged and found in less than a minute?
ABBYY FineReader - OCR made easy
ABBYY is a well known name in document recognition, data capturing and linguistic software utilities, and FineReader 10 is its latest in the OCR category. FineReader not only helps convert images to text or tables, but also helps convert them into searchable PDF files for easy cataloging and searching. The application is intuitive and easy to operate. It can recognize images from scanners, digital cameras and mobile phone cameras. So now you can turn your mobile camera into a document scanner using the power of this tool.
Installation
Installation and registration is without any hassles and takes just a few minutes. The application takes up anywhere between 120 MB to 250 MB of memory resources, depending on the image and number of pages it scans for conversion. The application sprawls over 650 MB of hard drive space and still requires around 500 MB for its work area. The user interface is pretty straight-forward, but there seemed to be a few minor changes over the previous version. So if you are accustomed to using version 9, you might have to hunt for a few key options, which are a bit difficult to find, but once found, you will never miss it again.
Features and Performance
The application initially starts with a wizard that has all the necessary options to convert your existing PDF documents and images or to pickup an image from a scanner into Microsoft Word, Excel, searchable PDF or editable PDF formats. You can choose to either process the image automatically or manually.
User intervention is needed occasionally
A new user to FineReader will be welcomed by the easy-to-use interface. Though the automatic OCR process is almost 90 percent precise, manual intervention is needed in certain cases; for example, places where a photo, artwork or table overlaps text in a certain area need to be corrected for better accuracy. We threw a few saved images, PDF documents and a few more images using a camera at it, and FineReader did quite a wonderful job. Its ability to pick up tables and images from hard-to-read areas is truly great.
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Additional features**
A bonus addition to the application is the Screenshot Reader utility, which can instantly convert screenshots into text or tables, or simply email the image itself. You will need to register the software via the Internet to start using the Screenshot Reader utility.
The wizard makes converting scans to text really easy
You can capture specific regions of images and the reader will convert the text within that image area. Whether it’s an area of capture, active application window, a full screen, or a timed screenshot of the entire desktop, the Screenshot Reader does an excellent job. Additionally, you can save the converted text directly into a file, Word document, Excel sheet, or send it as an email.
Verdict
ABBYY FineReader 10 is available in three versions - Professional, Corporate and Site License, and incorporates the second generation of ADRT (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology). This technology enables recreation of the logical structure and formatting elements in multi-page documents. Hence, FineReader can actually analyze and process a multi-page document image as a single entity rather than multiple pages. The ADRT is quite powerful and can reconstruct the table of contents, headers and footers, page numbers, footnotes, fonts, styles, captions or tables, bullet points, numberings and logical text flow. FineReader can also recognize languages for easier conversion of image to text. Two new languages, Korean and Yiddish, have been added into FineReader’s database. It does its job quickly and accurately, using its multi-core processor support. Overall, ABBYY FineReader is an excellent character recognition utility in terms of both speed and accuracy.
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