Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned tens of thousands of FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also tried every other OCR software that is available for PCs. There are other good packages that can serve some needs adequately, but for my work, FR6 is superior in every respect. In particular it is substantially better than the most popular OCR program, OmniPage Pro 12, as well as quite a bit less expensive. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.
The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM.
On this system, FR6 is quite speedy and normally can perform recognition as rapidly as the fastest of desktop scanners will scan. It offers a choice of a fully automatic mode, partly automatic modes, or a very wide selection of user-specified modes. New users will get very good results on most material using the automatic mode and can learn to use its more powerful features as their needs dictate. Even in its automatic mode FR6 is superior to other packages in recognizing difficult text, speed, tools for correcting errors that do appear, and flexibility of output.
One notable and important strength of FR 6 for my purposes is its ability to deal with the many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols in the typical academic article. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up. Very often I can scan an entire 20-page article and find not a single mistake.
As I say, there are other products which will no doubt serve many people well. If something else comes free my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, if you find you need something better, FR6 is the clear choice.
If you do have another product be sure to see if you qualify for a "competitive upgrade" to FR6 at an even lower price...
Recently ABBYY has brought out version 7.0, which for some reason Amazon carries only in the expensive "corporate" edition, intended for networked operations. The improvements over version 6.0 include somewhat better recognition accuracy; manual control over page splitting; ability to read PDF files, edit, and re-save the edited file in PDF or another format; and improved editing tools. It is definitely worth getting version 7.0 rather than 6.0, but it appears that you have to go to some other vendor than Amazon to get the consumer-oriented "professional" edition.
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