Customer Reviews

Abbyy FineReader 10 Professional [Old Version]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have used this product since Version 7. Once you know about it, it is hard to imagine living without it. Although OCR is the focus of its advertisement, it is a great way to capture (and manipulate) text or figures from a variety of sources. Added bonus (how rare is this): they actually have technical support that is both accessible and knows the product (they also seem to offer the technical support indefinitely). All software should be as good as Finereader and the company.

OCR software is used to import various documents or files to your computer and it then allows you to edit them for archiving or desk top publishing purposes.

This is a very impressive and easy-to-use piece of OCR software, which supports several formats of imported files (such as a scanned document, a jpeg, word document, pdf document etc), and exports them to a large variety of popular editable formats. Many scanners include software with an OCR facility, but these may not be 100% accurate and invariably won't import a mixture of text and pictures. This program allows you to do that. This allows you to view the imported document against the converted document side by side, highlighting possible changes to be made or potential errors before saving the final document. I have found the accuracy success rate to be very high, with minimal changes required.

Despite being functionally-rich, the price tag is a bit hefty for personal home use and this software is probably more suited to a small to medium business looking to scan and/or archive large volumes of documents. Nevertheless it does what it's meant to very well.

Feel free to check out my blog which can be found on my profile page.

For years I had used Abbyy finereader V5 and gotten more accurate results with it than any other OCR bundle, even though some of the competitor's versions I tested were newer.

I was also sort of stuck with V5, as the price of Abbyy finereader was always close to the $300 mark.

I setup and install scanners and associated software for 100's of end users.
So I have had the opportunity to try several programs over the years.
Like multiple versions of paperport, and also readiris, textbridge, and even some shareware programs.
Abbyy is still my favorite for OCR accuracy.

I picked up Abbyy Finereader version 10 for home use late last year during their $99.00 sale (it was an anniversary or some such sale).

So far it seems to work well, even with the cheaper scanners.

I've tested it with a:
- canon LIDE 50
- canon LIDE 100
- visioneer Strobe XP 220

Another good program is Kofax Virtual Rescan (AKA Kofax VRS).
It can scan most anything you feed through your scanner.]
It scans colored paper, pictures and carbon copy receipts well also.
Unfortunately Kofax is like $400.
I use Kofax VRS more for making copies of receipts and/or documents and Abbyy for OCR.

I solved my initial problem with this product following a helpful instruction from another user to change a "save" setting in option. I am going to remove this review in a week.

Thank you,

Pro: High Accuracy in Conversion, Easy to Use, Good Customer Care
Con: High Price

Abbyy does a pretty good job of reading characters, etc, but they "improved" the way single scanned images/pages from a multi-page document are displayed, and made their good software almost useless.

Previously, a single scanned image/page was displayed, and you could zoom into a small area of the image in order to tweak layout settings, Using the scrollbar to the right, you could move around that same page and make adjustments here & there as needed, prior to OCR-ing. The window/scrollbar combination always stayed ONLY on the page you were editing. In order to go to the next page, you simply used the thumbnail window to click on it.

NOW, with version 10, some doofus at Abbyy decided it would be cool to modify the display so that if the user moves the scrollbar up or down near the top or bottom of the page/image they are working on, it automatically causes the display to jump forward or back many (MANY) pages VERY suddenly and very quickly without any warning WHATSOEVER, causing the user to immediately lose track of the page they were just working on. Now, they have to try to scroll back to that part of the book/doc they were working on. But they probably did not remember the exact page number they were on, so they have to manually scroll to locate it. This often means they unintentionally jump hundreds of pages back in THE OPPOSITE direction past the page! The scrollbar does not have a visual marker to indicate WHEN the pages will suddenly start jumping ahead or back, nor is it possible to disable this terrible and idiotic "feature", so there is no way to prevent all this scrolling around without moving the scrollbar up & down VERY SLOWLY. Needless to say, this makes editing the layout of a page/image which is part of a multipage document a total pain in the ass, and nearly impossible.

DO NOT BUY ABBYY 10 if you need to OCR books or multi-image documents requiring layout/recognition tweaks. You will find yourself screaming in sheer frustration every time you attempt to navigate around the page you are working on.