Customer Reviews

Abbyy FineReader 9 Express Edition [Old Version]

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I'm a researcher and I come across scanned images of technical papers written decades earlier. I also come across a lot of badly encoded PDF papers (thanks to the PS2PDF converter). Converting these documents into searchable PDF's makes referencing much easier. This is where ABBYY Finereader 9.0 Express Edition came to my rescue.

What it does:
Converts your images to searchable PDF's. Most free OCR programs does OCR for images and output a text file. The text is separate and the image is separate. This software creates a pdf with a transparent text layer on the top of the image(s). Also, the transparent layer's formatting is such that it matches closely with the formatting in the image (text position, size, direction, etc).

Apparently, it can also create HTML, RTF, XLS from scans. I don't have any need for these features and I haven't tried them out.

The Good:
1) ABBYY claims it can recognize 100-200 languages. I haven't tried those since my papers are all in English.
2) Takes TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and a lot of other formats as inputs. If you have multiple images (page1.png, page2.png, etc), this software treats them as separate pages and outputs a single PDF file.
3) OCR is pretty much without any user intervention. It generates warning messages, though.
4) Once OCR processing is done, you are given the option to save the PDF without doing anything (convenient for large documents). The software marks up 3 kinds of areas - text, images and tables. You can go back and draw up the areas yourself if you think the software has done it wrong and then OCR is re-run with the new areas.
5) Inexpensive!

The bad:
1) No command-line support and no batch processing.
2) You need a registration code and a licence key. The licence key won't work if you migrate or re-install the program. I don't know how good ABBYY customer support is when it comes to giving a new key for migration/reinstall.
3) No PDF input!!! This ridiculous annoyance is because their professional version has PDF input support and they want you to buy the pro version instead. A free software called "Ghostscript" provides a workaround for this. Just google for "ghostscript pdf to tiff" or something similar.
4) It doesn't handle more than one language per document.

I have been a long time user of the Finereader 6.0 Sprint Trial Version and have been very pleased with its speed and accuracy. Recently I decided to support ABBYY by buying the newer version of this product but after side-by-side comparisons have been disappointed with the 9.0 Express. It takes longer to do an OCR and gets less correct words than its predecessor with the same image file.

Save your $50 and just download the free trial version of 6.0 Sprint.

I purchased the 9.0 Express Version, not realizing that it gives no options at all for tweaking the output for OCR, and also does not support producing batch files. It is definitely not the product I was expecting. I understand that other ABBYY products are much more satisfactory. I guess "Express Version" means the sleazy, no-options version. Too bad I didn't realize that before making the purchase.