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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gives you a low-cost, high-performance OCR package, December 15, 2002
Abbyy's Home Edition follows the trend of software publishers to milk previous versions of their software, in this case, Abbyy's Finereader 5.0 (the current version for those with lots of money being 6). The OCR engine is solid, and the "1-button" interface is uncomplicated.When it's time to move beyond the 1-button world, the product has a number of beyond-the-basic features, including the ability to manually identify regions of text, tables, and graphics. For much of today's complex and graphic-intensive layouts, you'll find yourself using this mode, if only to avoid annoying glitches such as parts of dense tables showing up as graphics
in the recognized file, or side-by-side columns becoming tables. Home Edition handles both scanned files (...) and a wide range of graphic files that contain text. Fortunately, although the manual states that Home Edition recognizes only the first page of multi-page graphics files, that's not true -- all the pages of multi-page FAX TIFF files are recognized. Recognition is good. For scans at normal resolution, 300 dpi, the total number of errors per page for a mix of type from 9 down to 7 points -- pretty small for OCR -- were the same as my old, 1999 Scansoft Textbridge Pro 8.0. However, the Home Edition errors were far easier to fix ("S" for "$" on small, 7-point type for AHE, less annoying to me than the strange concatentions or "wordifications" for TP8 (such as "Pap er" or "andPublish"). When the same material is scanned into Home Edition at 600 dpi (to add detail to the very small type), errors dropped to half that of Textbridge, which doesn't accept scans of this resolution. A very difficult case, a second-generation FAX of a magazine article originally in tabloid and reduced to 8 1/2 x 11, was recognized surprisingly well with Home Edition, despite the fact that the type was fuzzy and 4-6 points in size -- and the bioprocessing subject matter had out-of-the-ordinary words. However, the 1-button process made tables of some of the columns, so manual marking of the original was needed. I miss the ability to view the original scan during proof-reading in Textbrige (and the Abbyy higher-end products) -- as you move the cursor through the recognized document, these show you the same area of the scanned file. In Home Edition, you have to move between the scan and the recognized windows and find your own place. There's also no built-in spell-checker, an odd omission considering the low cost of licensing spellchecking code these days. Perhaps Abbyy is justifying the gap in pricing between Home Edition (less than[$$]) and the Professional line ([$$-$$] at the Abbyy site store). Versus the Pro Edition, Home Edition has 12 languages (121 for Pro); no pattern training for symbols; and no background or batch mode. There's apparently fewer options with HE's manual layout analysis than for the Pro Edition, but the HE options are just fine for most purposes. Abbyy HE saves recognized text as ASCII TXT, Word, Excel, Word Pro and Word Perfect files, plus HTML and Adobe PDF. The good OCR engine, the ability to handle multiple types of graphics files, and to preserve graphics color, plus its straight-forward interface all make this a good product.
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