Product Reviews

Optical Character Recognition or OCR software can 'read' the text in scanned images and turn it into editable text files. You could take a page from a favourite book, scan it, and then make changes in Word, for example. Chances are, you got some kind of basic OCR software with your scanner. There's a difference, though, between bundled OCR utilities and full-blown standalone packages like this one.

Bundled utilities tend to be able to read just one page at a time. What's more, they can only analyse text in a single column, struggling to cope with multi-column layouts, like this magazine page, and certainly not reproducing the original layout in Word, say, or HTML.

As you'll have guessed, FineReader Pro 6.0 does both of these things. It's going to be ideal for people who need to electronically archive documents for searching, editing or re-writing later on. It might be letters from your bank manager, it might be research papers published in journals. You can either scan documents directly from within FineReader using any TWAIN-compliant scanner (and that's pretty much all of them), or scan them separately, opening the scans in FineReader at your leisure to carry out the recognition process.

What's especially neat is that it can open

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and OCR not just common bitmap image files, but PDF files too, and one result of this is that you can effectively turn PDFs into Word documents or HTML. FineReader can output PDFs too. The PDF format is ideal for electronic distribution because, unlike HTML, the content is encapsulated in a single file, and prints consistently on different machines.

FineReader caters for both beginners and more experienced users. A step-by-step wizard walks you through the whole process if you're new to the game, whereas if you already know your way around an OCR package you can batch process existing scans, manually split up pages into segments for more reliable recognition and spellcheck the recognised results, adding new words to your dictionary or correcting words that have been recognised incorrectly.

FineReader actually works in such a similar way to rivals OmniPage and TextBridge that if you've used either one of those you'll be instantly at home here - the OCR workflow is split into the same Scan, Recognise, Check and Save stages.

Recognition accuracy seems very good, though as with any OCR software, the worse the quality of the original, the less reliable it's going to be. Faxed fine print is likely to give you problems, but few original printouts will.

FineReader has some good ideas. The interface is very modern-looking and helpful, and you can customise both the toolbars and the window layout. It also checks word 'paradigms' (grammatical usage and meaning) in its dictionary to aid correct recognition later.

ABBYY's only rival is ScanSoft, which publishes OmniPage Pro and TextBridge Pro. TextBridge is a little cheaper than FineReader, but FineReader's a little more polished. It's a likeable but powerful program that's perfect for anyone who needs to store and work with large quantities of printed matter.