Product Reviews

Character recognition software enables your PC to turn scanned letters, magazine pages and other documents into editable text files. ABBYY FineReader is a versatile and precise program that goes one better than many of its competitors by being able to cope with magazine layouts and other complex formatting.
The chances are that if you've got a scanner, you'll already have some kind of OCR (optical character recognition) software bundled with it - so why pay extra for yet another text recognition program? The answer is accuracy and control. Basic OCR programs can interpret and reformat only simple, linear text files. They'll cope with business letters quite happily, but complex multi-column layouts or magazine pages are often too difficult for them. More advanced software, on the other hand, can reproduce the original layout and export it to Word, HTML, PDF or other formats.
It's this level of sophistication that ABBYY claims sets FineReader Professional apart from other packages, including ABBYY's own FineReader Sprint, which many scanner manufacturers bundle free with their products.
FineReader is easy to use. It works by dividing the page into rectangular 'zones', then determining what's in each zone - text, picture or something else. Once you've scanned in your document, you can leave the program to automatically 'zone' the document into text and graphics blocks or do it yourself manually. Once it has found all the text in a document, FineReader works on recognising it, reproducing the

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original layout and exporting that layout to the program of your choice. Usually, you'll want that to be some sort of word processor that will allow you to edit the text yourself.
For the most part, FineReader works really well. It's simple to use, accurate - and good at interpreting and retaining even fairly complicated magazine layouts. This isn't to say that the software is perfect. The smaller the type you're scanning, the more mistakes creep into the recognition. Exactly where the cut-off point comes depends on the quality of the material you're scanning, and on the fonts used. We had trouble scanning anything smaller than 8-point Arial. The program also had difficulties recognising as separate elements captions and text that appeared within graphics, and placing them accordingly. Finally, if you scan from a magazine that uses starbursts or bullet points with text inside them, don't expect FineReader to recognise that text. This is all really finicky stuff, though. This piece of software is basically good at its job.
Text recognition isn't as simple as just recognising individual characters. To be sure that it's accurately deciphering the lines on the page, the software needs to know whether or not the letters it thinks it sees actually form real words. FineReader comes with a multilingual selection of dictionaries. This edition also includes specialist medical and legal dictionaries in order to make the program more useful for professionals. Other features in this latest version of FineReader Professional include a toolbar that enables you to do an OCR scan directly from within Word, and smoother export to PDF. You can also output files directly to e-mail and to Microsoft PowerPoint, so you can turn the scans into slides for a presentation.
This is a pretty niche product. If all you use your scanner for is photos and the odd letter, the character recognition software that came bundled with it will be good enough. If you scan in lots of newspaper and magazine articles, though, and you're sick of them coming out garbled, then FineReader is the answer to your prayers.