Abbyy’s FineReader has made a name for itself in the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) arena with its fast and accurate recognition. OCR is a technology by which a software can convert scanned text from any page to text that can be edited in a word processing application. It is a complicated process, and has many limitations like not being able to properly identify smudged text, or handwritten notes. But those aside, let’s look at the latest version of
FineReader.
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FineReader takes its input from any TWAIN compliant scanner, or an image in any one of several formats including JPEG, TIF and BMP. However, what really caught our fancy was the capability of the software to be able to give output in several popular formats - Word documents, Excel worksheets, PDF files or even an HTML page that can be displayed in any web browser. The software window is split into four panes. One shows a thumbnail view of previously scanned documents, another shows the scanned image, a third is used to zoom into a scan and the final pane shows you the text that FineReader has ‘read’.
Overall, it’s to use and has useful features. Most of the time FineReader will preserve your page layout, and even correctly guess the column widths, fonts, and font sizes. It continually amazed us with its features and accurate results in our tests. Converting a printed or written page to text using FineReader is very simple. Just click the ‘Scan and Read’ button, and it automatically fires up the scanner software, scans the page and converts it to text. If you have say, a whole transcript spanning multiple pages, there is a batch mode. Here FineReader automatically scans as many sheets as you want, and converts them to text on-the-fly.
If FineReader is unsure of anything that it has translated, it will highlight the text so that you can manually change it yourself. There is an in-built spell-checker as well to assist you and many different languages are supported. Another useful function is the ability to train the software to recognize new characters. There is a comprehensive help available with the software should you get stuck somewhere, but you probably will not use it very often.
With its accurate results, FineReader has a wide target audience–from a student making a project to a business professional scanning his presentations.
Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs