Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Pro OCR

by Abbyy USA

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005B42L
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 9, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,973 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #75 in Software > Business & Office > Document Management > Scanning & OCR
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

For optical character recognition (OCR) software to be more effective than hiring a fast typist, it has to be very accurate. It also helps if it can recognize a range of languages. FineReader Pro 5.0 comes with support for more than a hundred languages, although it spell checks only around 25 of the more common ones. It also recognizes programming languages like Java and Pascal.

The quality of recognition of the English texts tested was high--selected texts, from magazines, newspapers, and printouts, required little editing. FineReader Pro 5.0 saves images from the source documents as well as text, recognizes formatting such as column breaks, and will recognize tables. You can send scanned material to the clipboard for pasting into any editor you choose, or send it directly to Microsoft Word, Lotus Word Pro, Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarWriter, or Microsoft Excel. It can also be sent straight to e-mail, or saved as HTML.

The more advanced points of FineReader Pro 5.0, such as fine-tuning scanning quality for optimum results and managing tables accurately, require a little practice to master, and the interface is a bit on the cluttered side. However, for standard OCR tasks, FineReader Pro 5.0 is a useful and efficient application. --Sandra Vogel

Amazon.com Product Description

Abbyy Fine Reader 5.0 Pro is optical character recognition (OCR) software recommended for home use. A built-in editor lets users edit the image layout manually. Edit recognized text while looking at an image of the source text in the Zoom window. The built-in spell checker will search text for misspelled words in mere seconds. Version 5.0 supports batch document processing allowing users to save source images, batch options, and recognized texts in the same folder. The system supports direct launch from Microsoft Word and background recognition. Users may also train the system to recognize new characters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FineReader 5.0 beats Omnipage 11 and Textbridge 2k, July 12, 2001

By 

ScanMan (California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Pro OCR (CD-ROM)

I scan books that are in the public domain, which is a demanding task for OCR software. The bottom line is that the Abbyy FineReader Pro v5.0 is THE BEST OCR software on the market right now. It far surpasses Scansoft's Textbridge Millennium. The only thing that even gives FineReader Pro 5.0 any competition is Scansoft's OmniPage Pro 11, but FineReader is still far better. Since Scansoft bought out Textbridge (from Xerox) and bought out OmniPage (from Caere), you would think they could develop a superior product, but that's not so. Omnipage appears to be billed as an upgrade to Textbridge (I'm guessing that Scansoft is sending Textbridge to the graveyard). Scansoft claims in an advertisement that they spent a YEAR combining the programs. However, Scansoft did not even include rudimentary features of Textbridge in OmniPage 11. For instance, if you scan a book two pages at a time with the binding flat against the scanner (this is very common for older books that need to remain intact), Textbridge Millennium could split apart the pages using a dual-page mode. This was an extremely helpful if not critical feature for scanning books. However, this feature does not exist in OmniPage 11. FineReader on the other hand, can do this and more. It works great with Auto Document Feeders and it is far more accurate than OmniPage 11. Finally, FineReader's error/spell checker is once again far superior to OmniPage 11. The only single advantage that OmniPage 11 has over FineReader 5.0 is that it can import Adobe PDF documents for further OCR work. Otherwise FineReader Pro 5.0 is the way to go.

Also, regarding a former review, FineReader allows you to exclude optional-hyphens in the output file. Check in the advanced section of the output format. Including them is not a mistake. It's actually quite impressive that the program knows those that are optional-hyphens and those that are not.

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome., May 19, 2001

By 

S Smyth (Belfast, Co Antrim United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Pro OCR (CD-ROM)

Not a term I use too often, but prior to getting my hands on Abbyy's FineReader 5.0 Pro I was always under the impression that OCR software was a joke; an opinion bolstered by mine and others' experience of applications like Text-Bridge. Not FineReader. This stuff is in its ability to convert scanned documents into text files that can then be formatted in your word-processor. With FineReader 5.0 Pro I can do what would take me over a week - assuming I didn't go loopy in the process of transcribing it - in under an hour; converting about 20,000.00 words worth, into a useable MS-Word or RTF file.

FineReader makes very few mistakes. Some worth mentioning are the following:

Text hyphenated in order to allow a word to wrap in the original: This will give word splits with optional-hyphen symbols that will have to taken out individually in your word-processor file.

Quotation marks will default to text-editor style without any left and right handing: This can be corrected globally in a given document by ( in MS- Word ) using the replace all function and entering the normal quotation marks in the find and replace boxes. This applies to both single and double quotes.

Text set in columns with cross-column footnotes will create a line or two of rubbish, but the columns will be successfully interpreted as a single one in your word-processor document, providing you remember to save the processed file without any formatting. I reckon you should save all processed files without retaining the original formatting to make life easier.

You can also output a processed file as a PDF and an HTML page. Be sure to consider the settings for these export options, otherwise you can end up with an enormous PDF or an HTML page that won't work in older browsers.

I would also encourage a user to dispense with all the Wizard toolbars and get familiar with the commands via the menu bar. This is a better and more flexible way to work, and potentially less confusing. And buy a decent scanner, too. Epson do good ones such as their perfection series.

If you want an OCR application that really works, get FineReader 5.0 Pro. You'll recoup its incredibly modest cost in one job.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good Desktop OCR Product, May 17, 2002

By 

Nelson R. Kent (Colorado Springs, Colorado USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Pro OCR (CD-ROM)

After looking around the Internet for information on affordable PC desktop OCR products, it seemed clear to me that Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro" was probably the best product for my needs. I have not been disappointed. I read a lot of negative "press" about OCR capabilities in general and I was not impressed by the OCR software bundled with my Canon 620P Scanner. You should also keep in mind that this was my first experience with any kind of OCR software.

My immediate requirement was to translate a five year-old, 57 page document to MS Word, so that it could be updated. The source document was lost sometime in the past. As a consequence, no one was interested in starting "from scratch" to update the document. The survivng hardcopy of the document was produced by a laser printer in black and white on 8 1/2 by 11 plain paper. The content consisted of text, logos, graphics, and a number of simple tables.

It took me approximately 2.5 hours to scan the entire document and about 2 days, full time, to complete the project. This time estimate includes the time to get familiar with the program.

Without counting the total number of words in the document, I would estimate that FineReader was 99% accurate translating the text. The only place it had any difficulty was in procesing some of the section header numbers in the table of contents (TOC). For exampe, the program translated the image "8.x" to "&.x" in several instances and also confused "I"s and "1"s several times. Given the italicized font of the characters images and the errors are easy to understand. The few errors I did find were quickly identified and easily corrected manually in MS Word.

Tables took a little more manual work. FineReader's layout analysis logic had no problem identifying all of the tables, but, as noted in the software documentation, the program may not always be able to convert table cells with multiple lines of text and preserve the table row and column alignment of the orignal document. In my case, these problems were easy to fix using the column and row identifier tool provided in the software. Once I marked the location of rows and columns on the scanned image of the table, the tables were translated correctly, requiring only minor editing "touch-up" to align text in table cells to match the original document.

The only problem I have encountered with this software product was the result of the distribution package I received. Abbyy offers a "try and buy" distribution that consists of a 3.5" floppy diskette and a CD-ROM. The combination of media provides copy protection and is not problem unless, like me, you have a laptop PC that can support either a CD-ROM or a 3.5" floppy diskette, but not both at the same time. In short, I called Abbyy's technical support line and they told to return the floppy diskette and CD-ROM to them and they would send me a single CD-ROM. I isntalled and used the single CD-ROM I received from the vendor with no further problems.

The "message" is that you should make sure you understand which distribution of the software you are purchasing. The box did state, in the system requirements section, that the program required a 3.5" diskette and a CD-ROM drive. I did not deduce, however, that both devices were required concurrently.

The manual that came with my distribution was entirely adequate for my purposes, suffering only from the occasional grammatical problem common to many manuals for products developed in countries where English is not the native language. (FineReader was developed by Abbyy, a Russian company with headquarters in Moscow.)

I am an experienced computer user and typically install a new software product and then try to use it immediately without bothering to read the documentation. I believe you could take this approach with FineReader, but I recommend reading the documentation first, particularly, if, like me, you are not familiar with the basic flow of the OCR process. The manual isn't that long and you probably won't need to read all of it, to get enough information to starting using FineReader productively.

Because I am not an experienced OCR user, I am reluctant to say that this product will meet the needs of everyone or every job. I was delighted, however, with what the product was able to do for me. As I said at the beginning of my comments, I was not disappointed by Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro".