As in abbyy finereader. How to use ABBYY FineReader

So, we have FineReader installed on our computer. We turn on the scanner and digitize some multi-page document. Let's call it, conditionally, "Agreement".

We put the first page of the document on the scanner glass, close the lid. Launch the FineReader program. Click the "Scan" button, or press the "Ctrl + K" combination with the keys. The "ABBYY FineReader Scanning" window opens. When digitizing an ordinary text page with a typed font of 11-12 points, leave the settings in the default window and press the "View" button.

The scanner works and after a few seconds we see our page in the viewport. Here we can change the size of the scan if needed. And then we press the "Scan" button.

FineReader starts the OCR process and within a minute the page image opens in the program window. The right side of the window is now divided into three sections. In the left section "Image" we can edit the image. You can read more about image editing in the lesson: Scanning a book. In the right section "Text" you can immediately make changes to the text - edit the content of the page before saving it. This is very convenient when you need, for example, to quickly change the dates, details, surnames in the document.

The icon of the recognized page appears in the left part of the "Pages" window:

If you don't need to edit anything, replace the first page on the scanner glass with the second page and repeat the technology. Having adjusted the scan size once in the "Scanning ABBYY FineReader" window in "Preview" mode for the first page, now immediately click the "Scan" button. The settings made for the first page are saved, and the subsequent pages are scanned without preview. So we scan all the pages of our document.

We finished, and now, by alternately clicking on the icons, we open the pages, checking their correct sequence.

After that, in the left part of the "Pages" window, select all the icons with the button: "Edit - Select All" or with the keyboard shortcut: "Ctrl + A". Then, in the drop-down list next to the "Save" button, select the command: "Save as pDF document":

Now we hit the button itself and save the document with the name "Agreement.pdf" in the "Agreement" folder:

As a result, we get a multi-page text document in pdf format - an electronic version of our document with the code name "Agreement".

So, with FineReader we digitize text documents.

By changing the scanning mode to "color" in the "ABBYY FineReader Scanning" window, we can also easily digitize color pictures and photographs.

And, asking in context menu, for example, the command: "Save as microsoft document Word 2007 "let's transform our project into a single multi-page editable Word document.

In general, the program is easy to digest, intuitive and pop-up tips everywhere.

The conversation will be about ABBYY FineReader 12, that is, about its latest version. Without looking too far, we have chosen the most famous product of ABBYY, which, to its merits, is perfectly Russified. Already at first glance, Fine Reader (FR) gives the impression of a program with good Russian-language support: in this regard, everything is really done at a very decent level, including reference information.

In the beginning - retreat. The question of how to transfer all or some part of the archive to digital format (and what, in fact, is understood by the word "digital"). Buying a scanner hardly solves all the problems. Of course, very often a disc or several with a proprietary software... However, already at the stage of sanitation it turns out that the quality of the scanning program leaves much to be desired, or the format in which the saving takes place, unfortunately, is not suitable for storage. Why? Most graphic formats do not separate the text from the non-text space of the document, and therefore it is not possible to copy any excerpt from such a file.

It is in such cases that functional text recognition programs come to the rescue, whose capabilities, in particular, include extracting text from an image.

Introducing ABBYY FineReader

Package ABBYY Finereader 12 - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. Designed both for automatic input of printed documents into a computer, and for converting PDF documents and photographs into editable formats (from the program manual)

The abbreviation "OCR" applies to all data recognition applications (not just text). The source for data extraction can be printed or electronic document... Once upon a time, few people knew about OCR, in one form or another, and the process of translating text into electronic view turned into a mere routine, right up to manual reprinting of the original text. Today, having a flatbed scanner (only a few people use a hand-held scanner at home) and finereader 12- be sure - no difficulties in scanning and recognition will arise.

Starting with the sixth version, FineReader supports import and export in pDF format , patented by Adobe. Many readers have probably encountered difficulties in translating from this format to any other (doc, etc.), since indeed useful programs there is not so much in this area (only ABBYY's subsidiary PDF Transformer is worthy of attention). The fact is that such programs carry out text recognition only once, as a result of which the "identity" of the result is not at all great (depending on the complexity of the document), plus the formatting of the document is pretty much lost.

This is not the case with FineReader. The ninth version of the program includes a technology called Document OCR. It is based on the principle of integral document recognition: it is analyzed and recognized as a whole, and not page by page. At the same time, all kinds of columns, headers and footers, fonts, styles, footnotes and images remain intact or are replaced by those close to the original.

Installing the package

Demo-version of Finereader 12 can be downloaded from the Abbyy.ru website, in the Download section, the full licensed version is distributed on a CD-ROM. The purchase methods can be found on the same website in the "Buy" section.

On the ABBYY developers website you can download a demo version of ABBYY FineReader version 12 (or another one that is current for today)

ABBYY FineReader is distributed in several versions: Professional Edition, Corporate Edition, Site License Edition, etc. The difference between the Professional version and the rest is that it is designed to work in a corporate network with the ability to work together on document recognition. Otherwise, the difference is insignificant and depends on the choice of the terms of the license agreement.

It's hard to imagine that FineReader 2.0 existed 12 years ago, which took about 10 MB of disk space. Over time, the package "grew" tenfold and now in the installed form takes up to 300 MB. A lot or a little - judge for yourself. The new FR supports 179 recognition languages, among which there are little-known artificial languages \u200b\u200b(Ido, Interlingua, Ocidental and Esperanto), programming languages, formulas, etc. Let's not forget about the support of various formats and scripts. So, if for some reason you want to limit the space occupied by the package, during installation, mark only those components that will be in demand during work.

The choice of components affects the installation time, which, however, should not take long. During the installation process, you will be introduced to the basic features of FR. After activation (via the Internet, via E-mail, using the received code, etc.), the program is ready for fully functional work. In demo mode, you will certainly encounter various restrictions, which, unfortunately, do not allow you to fully use the package.

FineReader interface. Functionality

Access to the program's capabilities is available both through the scripts that appear in the main menu immediately after the installation process, and, in fact, through the main interface.

Appearance program from version to version does not undergo any special changes: the developers do not see the point in changing it drastically. Considerable attention is paid to ergonomics, which is noticeable in all ABBYY products (Lingvo, PDF Transformer, FlexiCapture ...). In other words, Fine Reader 12's interface is well thought out and inclined towards all users, including beginners. The principle of "Get the result in one click" will appeal to those who are not used to adjusting and changing something. On the other hand, more experienced users can fine-tune FineReader through the preferences dialog (Tools -\u003e Options ...). The only caveat: for comfortable work in the application, it is advisable to set the screen resolution to 1280 × 800 so that all the tools are always, as they say, at hand.

After launching the Fine Reader program, a window with buttons for quick access to the program functions will appear. This menu is also available through the Tools -\u003e ABBYY FineReader menu, the "Basic Scripts" button in the far right corner of the program, or through the Ctrl + N keyboard shortcut (by analogy with Word, where this combination opens a new document).

Scan to Microsoft Word: in the ninth version of FineReader there is support for Microsoft Word 2007, which has not yet become popular. In turn, on the toolbar in applications Microsoft Office, the "branded" red icon appears in the add-ons section after installing FR.

In addition to Microsoft Office, FR supports integration with Microsoft Outlook, provides export of recognition results to the same Microsoft Word, Excel, Lotus Word Pro, Corel WordPerect and Adobe Acrobat. These features make it somewhat easier and faster to work with the program, especially if you have to work in it regularly.

PDF or images in Microsoft Word: recognize data from a PDF or other type of graphic file supported by Finereader 12. It should be noted that the technology of extracting text from a PDF file in FR is not just "peeling" the text content (there may be no text layer in PDF) from the graphic one. In fact, the recognition technology is quite difficult: after analyzing the content of the document, the program decides what and how to do with the text: simply extract or recognize, and so on for each text fragment.

Scan to Microsoft Excel: scan to XLS (format microsoft programs Excel) can be justified if the scanned image contains tables.

Scan to PDF: There are many reasons to scan to PDF. One of them is security: this is the only format familiar to FR, in the settings of which you can set a password lock. The password is set not only for opening a document, but also for printing it and other operations. It is possible to choose one of three encryption levels: 40-bit, 128-bit based on RC4 standard, 128-bit level based on AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).

Convert photo to Microsoft Word: file translation from graphic format (and it can be PDF or multipage image) in DOC / DOCX.

Open in Fine Reader: open graphic file (PDF, BMP, PCX, DCX, JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, PNG) for FineReader recognition.

Working in FineReader

Now - briefly about the features of the program. The whole process is divided into scanning, recognition and saving of results. After you have selected the type of program action, specified the file or device for scanning, FineReader performs its task step by step, which, by the way, is quite resource-intensive for the central processor.

If you are the happy owner of a dual-core processor, then working in the Fine Reader 12 package, you can appreciate the power of the computer's performance. The fact is that FR, having detected a dual-core processor, recognizes not one, but two pages of a document at once in parallel. A trifle - but nice.

First, there is scanning, then recognition and export of the temporary document in the selected format.

Scanning. You do not need to make any presets in FineReader (other than selecting a reader) before scanning. That is why scenarios were invented: they are designed to simplify the execution of the same type of actions.

Recognition. Simplification touched upon other little things as well. So, if you remember the previous versions of the program, before we had to manually change the language (languages, if there were several) of the document. Now this happens automatically, though not always. In the latter case, FR subtly suggests checking the document language.

Returning to the FR recognition technology: why does the program first scan the entire document as a whole, and not page by page? As already mentioned, the text is recognized based on the entire content: fonts of the same size / typeface, tables and borders, indents, etc. are selected.

Do not be surprised if FineReader 12 displays a message that the page cannot be recognized because no text area was found. For the sake of experiment, we photographed on mobile phone from the LCD screen -display area text document (however, knowing the result in advance). Fine Reader 12 did not recognize the text of the image, because it was clearly of such quality, which is clearly not enough for this. On the second run, we photographed a page with a text with a digital camera under normal lighting.

FineReader recognized the passage without any problems, retaining the formatting and marking with markers some questionable points or characters that may have variable spelling.

As you can see in the image, these are mainly dots, hyphens, commas - in general, small characters. In addition, it is clearly seen that the program took into account the irregularities, curvatures of the photographed page and aligned the lines of text. Conclusion - FR did an excellent job with its albeit not very difficult task.

Occasionally, some insignificant points may remain unnoticed by the Fine Reader program, but they are easy to correct manually. Fortunately, the package has its own WYSIWYG editor, the capabilities of which are quite enough for making the final editing of the document. Spell check is also available.

How to improve the recognition accuracy, so that later on, to a lesser extent, edit the text? First, you can connect a custom Microsoft Word dictionary. True, it is difficult to judge the increase in accuracy, except perhaps the increase in the vocabulary of the spell checker (a module that checks spelling and grammar). Among other things, to improve recognition, it makes sense to familiarize yourself with the program settings (Service -\u003e Options) and select one of two modes:

careful recognition - it can be selected when recognizing documents of any "complexity": with tables without grid lines, text, graphs, tables on a colored background, etc. It can also help with a poor-quality source for recognition

quick recognition - this mode Recommended for processing large volumes of documents with simple design, or if time does not allow for thorough recognition. In most cases, when you have black printed text on a white background, you can opt for fast recognition.

In general, improving the quality of FineReader's work is a separate topic for conversation, the details of which you can learn from the official help, namely in the section "How to improve the results obtained".

Saving the document. The last stage of work in Fine Reader 12 is saving the final result in a certain graphic / text format. Pre-settings for saving can be specified in the FR options: Service -\u003e Options, the "Save" tab. Each format has its own settings. When saving in DOCX format, care should be taken about format compatibility (DOCX format files are not recognized in Word 2003<). В txt-файлах не забудьте проверить правильность кодировки (особенно в случае с текстом в кириллице).

ABBYY Screenshot Reader

In many large packages, developers very often like to add small service utilities. For example, the well-known application for burning discs Nero includes a set of 3 - 5 utilities that allow something that even Nero itself cannot. Review (here you can download it as part of Fine Reader 12).

As for FineReader, it contains one small Screenshot Reader application. With it you can and quickly convert it to the desired format using FR. The program is available through the Start menu (Start -\u003e All Programs -\u003e ABBYY FineReader 12.0 -\u003e ABBYY Screenshot Reader.).

Screenshot Reader's capabilities are somewhat wider than it might seem at first glance. (otherwise it would be possible to get by simply by pressing the "PrintScreen" key on the keyboard). In addition to the fact that Screenshot Reader takes a screenshot of the screen (or more precisely, a selected area of \u200b\u200bthe screen), the program is tightly integrated with FR.

When you press the "Snapshot" button on the Screenshot Reader panel, the cursor changes shape and the screen area selection tool is activated. The selected area of \u200b\u200bthe image is enclosed in a frame for further text recognition (it starts automatically).

In the drop-down list, you can select the desired action: in fact, Screenshot Reader duplicates FR quick scripts with the difference that instead of a snapshot from the scanner, a screenshot is sent to the input.

It should be noted that the program, along with the entire package, requires activation. When registering ABBYY FineReader 12 Professional Edition, Screenshot Reader is provided free of charge, as a "bonus".

Conclusion

FineReader - irreplaceable program for scanning and recognizing graphic data. The Russian-language interface and the availability of settings will not scare off an inexperienced user. Support for the latest formats, innovative technologies and, as a result, high-quality recognition make the program the best choice, especially since ABBYY FineReader still has no competitors in this area.

FineReader 12 hotkeys

• Create a new ABBYY FineReader document - CTRL + N
• Open an ABBYY FineReader document 12 - CTRL + SHIFT + N
• Save Pages - CTRL + S
• Save image to file - CTRL + ALT + S
• Recognize all pages of a document - CTRL + SHIFT + R
• Close current page - CTRL + F4
• Recognize selected pages of an ABBYY FineReader document - CTRL + R
• Open Scenario Manager - CTRL + T
• Open dialog Options "Fine Reader"- CTRL + SHIFT + O
• Open Help - F1
• Go to the Document window - ALT +1
• Go to Image window - ALT +2
• Go to the Text window - ALT +3
• Go to the Close-up window - ALT +4

The history of Abbyy FineReader goes back over 20 years. The company celebrated its jubilee 2013 with the release of a full-fledged (compared to the Express Edition of 2009) Abbyy FineReader Pro for Mac, and a couple of months later, in February 2014, they received their "gift" windows users - Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional and Corporate. Let me remind you that the previous version appeared back in 2011, and two and a half years is a long time - let's figure out how significant the changes are.

general information

System requirements for new version have not changed at all. The platform can be Windows or Windows Server starting from XP and 2003 respectively. Hardware requests at the present time are even more modest: a processor of any bit capacity with a frequency of 1 GHz, random access memory at least 1 GB plus 512 MB for each computing core, etc. Only the need for disk space - now the installation requires not 700, but 850 MB (plus, as before, another 700 MB for working files).

Naturally, we are talking about minimum requirements; the full capabilities of Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional will be revealed only on a relatively modern systems... In particular, let me remind you that the program can effectively parallelize the processing of individual pages, uses all processor cores and loads any processor by almost 100%. But it is really not greedy for RAM, and even remains 32-bit.

The installation procedure has not changed either: a minimum of questions and options. Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional still comes with Abbyy Screenshot Reader, which becomes operational only after user registration.

After that, access to technical support will also open.

Even on the basis of this modest information, it can be assumed that this is the result of evolution. Accordingly, in the future I will focus on describing the changes compared to the previous version, which can be conditionally divided into two main groups: working with the program (interface, auxiliary tools, usability) and OCR (quality and performance of the actual recognition).

Working with the program

Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional demonstrates some improvements in part user interface... This is immediately noticeable in the Tasks window, which opens by default when the program starts. It obviously mimics the concept of tiles in Windows 8.x and is adapted for finger control, especially since the program also supports basic gestures like scrolling and zooming. In fact, the changes affected only the "facade", and even then in part - next to the tiles are the usual controls and in the process of setting up any scenario you will have to deal with dialog boxes... Working with them with your fingers is quite problematic, especially on 8-10 ″ screens, which are becoming popular with Windows tablets.

It is really easy to imagine that the user of such a tablet equipped with a camera might want to quickly enter a printed document on the go. Meanwhile all windows history, starting with the first edition of the Tablet PC, confirms the pointlessness of adapting the standard desktop interface to touch control. Apparently, for these purposes it is much more correct to create a special skin that meets all the Metro canons, but uses the same "engine". An example such a decision serves Internet Explorer from Windows 8.x. In addition, Abbyy even has some groundwork in the form of Abbyy FineReader Touch for Windows 8, which uses the company's cloud service.

If we digress from touch input, then there will be more changes of this class - from the quite expected update of the windows for opening / saving documents, which, among other things, provide easy access to cloud storage (if there is a corresponding agent and its folder in the system), to several more important and useful ones.

Page processing in Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional now runs in the background. This implies the absence of the former modal window with the status of operations (now this role is played by the status line at the bottom of the screen) and, accordingly, the availability of access to the interface. Thus, the user has the opportunity to work with the program in parallel with the recognition process (if it is, of course, long enough), for example, copy fragments of the received text or even correct the layout of the pages - the latter will be queued and processed again.

Unlike the previous version, there is also no page turning as it is recognized or when bootstrap document if automatic recognition is disabled. In Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional, the document is loaded and paginated almost instantly, and their thumbnails are built only as you manually scroll in the left panel. Among other things, this saves computing resources, moreover, quite noticeably on large multi-page documents.

The rest of the changes in this class are not so interesting, although they may be useful in some scenarios, so they will be briefly discussed.

If you do not need to process the entire document, but only cite individual passages, then you can turn off all automatic operations and select the necessary fragments of any type, immediately copying them to the clipboard - while the analysis and recognition will be performed on the fly.

To get a result with a simpler structure than the original, you can turn off the recreation of headers, footers, footnotes, and other layout elements. This can be useful, for example, when preparing e-books.

Continuing on e-books - Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional supports ePUB formats 2.0.1 and 3.0.

Extended conversion options to XLSX, for example, it is now possible to clear formatting or save pictures.

When saving the resulting documents as PDF with a text layer, you can now use new technology Abbyy Precise Scan, which is the anti-aliasing of characters in the original page images. It is available, by the way, only in color mode.

The effect of her work is quite noticeable, although not always, let's say, "academic". However, the readability of anti-aliased characters should be higher in any case, and in this example the original is really of very low quality.

OCR

Now let's see what improvements have occurred in the mechanisms of recognition itself.

The developers report about the next stage of improving the ADRT technology, which, let me remind you, analyzes and recreates the logical structure of the document. It is declared that she began to work much more accurately, especially with tables, lists, diagrams. It is not so easy to demonstrate this with adequate examples, but it is not impossible. Here, for example, are the recognition results (with default settings) of the same page in Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional (above) and Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional (below).

The old version selected and processed only the main text block, possibly due to the poor quality of the original, considering the rest of the elements "rubbish". The new one, on the other hand, correctly identified the list and tried to recreate it. The result, however, is not ideal: the fact that not all markers were recognized can, again, be attributed to the image quality, but the program, apparently, still did not understand that there was content in front of it, otherwise it would not interpret the numbers as letters. Nevertheless, progress is evident, and on better quality originals, such claims might not have been.

And here is how an "implicit" table without dividing lines is processed - Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional (above) and Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional (below).

It is clearly seen that the old version, unlike the new one, did not see the table structure here at all and was limited to a set of unrelated text blocks. Do not be lazy to click on the images and compare the recognition results - in Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional it is close to ideal.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and already on the adjacent pages Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional showed results similar to those of Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional. Although it is ADRT that should have tracked the same "headers" and understand that in front of it is a kind of flowing table.

But it is still very noticeable that the updated algorithms pay attention to more details than before. During testing, Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional was observed, for example, even an attempt to interpret a picture as a table with an ordered placement on it text information... Much more often, the new version also tries to recreate various diagrams and diagrams based on background picture, and not from separate graphic and text blocks.

There are several more novelties designed to improve the recognition quality in Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional. As you know, one of the prerequisites for this is the quality of the original, especially if it was obtained with a camera rather than a scanner. That is why the means of preliminary processing of originals appeared in FineReader in due time. In the new version, their list has been expanded, adding cropping at the edges of pages, lightening and leveling the background brightness, removing colored elements. The latter can be useful, for example, for processing documents with seals and stamps. In addition, the user can now connect different methods individually.

Language support has also been improved. Firstly, the Russian alphabet with accents has appeared, and secondly, an increase in the quality of recognition of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (up to 20%), Arabic (up to 60%), Hebrew (up to 10%) is declared - this has been achieved, apparently, due to the improvement and additional training of classifiers.

And finally, one of the most burning questions for many readers: has the program's speed increased? It is not so easy to answer this question with arguments, especially with numbers - there are too many languages, each of which has its own nuances; the variety of originals is too great; there are too many unknown factors influencing the operation of algorithms. Therefore, even the developers themselves are rather restrained in talking about the productivity growth of Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional by 10-15%.

Such figures are usually obtained from the results of processing rather large arrays of documents and, accordingly, represent something like the "average temperature in the hospital." Therefore, it is useful to study in more detail some illustrative special cases, for example, similar to the following two:

• scanned in color with a resolution of 300 dpi 10 pages of full color A4 booklet. The quality is good, the languages \u200b\u200b†‹вЂ‹ are Russian and English, the layout is complex;
• PDF with graphic images 138 pages of a book containing a small amount of color and black and white illustrations, several tables. The quality is low (starting, apparently, with "blind" printing in a paper book), the languages \u200b\u200bare Ukrainian and Russian, the layout is simple.

Both documents were recognized in color mode, and the second also in black and white, which was intended to simulate the process of preparing an e-book. All default settings were left unchanged, with the exception of a set of languages \u200b\u200band, accordingly, operating modes. A PC with an i5-3450 processor and 8 GB of memory was used as a testing ground. The results are shown in the following table:

As you can see, for PDF the acceleration even exceeds the promised 15% - perhaps this is just one of the special cases that are well suited for the latest optimizations in recognition algorithms. It should be borne in mind that the programs, generally speaking, did a different amount of work. Take a look at the illustration above for table processing - it's hard to say which version was more difficult.

As for the number of errors, it was practically the same for both versions, although it was noticeable that sometimes different fragments and symbols cause doubts - this, apparently, is evidence of the training of algorithms. In any case, most of the uncertainly recognized characters were absolutely correctly identified using dictionaries, and “gross” errors (incorrect interpretation of special and decorative characters, text on graphics, etc.) coincided. So the difference can be considered disappearing altogether.

Another question is, how much does such a performance increase even matter? Apparently, a half-minute win on 138 pages that still needs to be checked and possibly adjusted is worth little. If work, like test tasks, is supposed to be performed from time to time, then you can definitely not worry about performance. Another thing is when it comes to the offline processing of large volumes of documents, which is available in Abbyy FineReader 12 Corporate. In this case, saving 15% of the time is already quite tangible.

Summary

Despite the fact that the new Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional does not promise anything revolutionary, at least a few changes in it deserve every praise. First of all, these are improvements in ADRT technology in terms of recognition of tables, diagrams and, in general, the logical structure of pages, which in some cases allows you to get dramatically better results, as well as background mode processing, which opens up new possibilities for interactive work with large documents.

There are also many other changes, although they are less significant. The movement towards support for touch control is certainly justified today, but the path chosen is vicious - to provide in one interface the same comfortable work mouse and fingers are hardly possible. However, while Windows tablets are just trying to break into the market, the Abbyy developers still have time.

Prices for Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional:

• boxed version: 4990 rubles;
• download version: 4490 rubles;
• update: 2690 rub.

As usual, the answer to the question “is it worth changing old version for a new one? " depends on the situation. In any case, it should be borne in mind that the life cycle of FineReader is quite long, and if any of the described improvements plays any significant role for you, then in 2-3 years the cost of updating will probably pay off - if not financially, then morally. To solve this issue for yourself will finally help.

One of the most popular functions for working with scanning and processing files different types - Fine Reader. Functional software product was developed russian company ABBYY, it allows not only to recognize, but also to process documents (translate, change formats, and more). Many users can only install, but cannot figure out how to use ABBYY FineReader. You can find answers to many questions in this article.

The program allows you to scan and recognize text - and not only

To understand in detail what kind of ABBYY FineReader 12 program it is, you need to consider in detail all its features. The first and easiest function is to scan a document. There are two options for scanning: with and without recognition. If you scan a printed sheet normally, you will get an image that was scanned in the specified folder on your computer device.

ATTENTION. The sheet must be laid on the scanning part of the printer straight, along the lines indicated on the printer. Do not allow the source to be wrinkled, this can lead to poor quality of the final scan.

You have to decide for yourself what FineReader is for you, since the utility has significant functionality, for example, you can choose what color you want to receive the image in, it is possible to convert all photos to black and white. Recognition is faster in black and white, and the processing quality increases.

If you are interested in ABBYY FineReader's OCR function, you need to press a special button before scanning. In this case, there are several options for obtaining information. By default, a recognized piece of the sheet will appear on your screen, which you can copy or edit manually.

If you choose other functions, you can immediately get the file as a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. The selection of functions is very simple, the menu is intuitive, easy to configure due to the fact that all the buttons you need are in front of your eyes.

IMPORTANT. Before you can recognize ABBYY FineReader text, you need to select the processing language exactly. Despite the fact that the utility works completely automatically, it happens that the low quality of the source does not allow us to understand what kind of language was in the source. This greatly reduces the quality of the final results of the application.

Several operating modes

To fully understand how to use ABBYY FineReader 12, you need to try two modes of operation "Careful" and "Fast recognition". The second mode is suitable for high quality images, while the first is suitable for low quality files. Thorough mode takes 3-5 times longer to process files.

The illustration shows the result of the program - OCR from an image

What other features are there?

OCR in ABBYY FineReader is not the only one useful function... For greater user convenience, there is

Defining document structure

ABBYY FineReader introduces a revolutionary new approach to document recognition. Now the document is analyzed and processed in its entirety, and not page by page, which allows FineReader to understand such elements of its internal structure as headers and footers, footnotes, captions for pictures and diagrams, styles, fonts, etc. The elements of the original document are restored in the resulting document. For example, when you save headers and footers in Word, footnotes are reproduced as corresponding objects in Word.

Excellent recognition quality and accurate design preservation

The ABBYY FineReader optical recognition system accurately recognizes and preserves the original layout of any document as fully as possible (including text on the background of pictures, with colored text on a colored background, with text wrapping around pictures, etc.)

Recognition of multilingual documents

ABBYY FineReader recognizes documents in 188 languages, including Russian, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Bashkir, Belarusian, Kazakh, Chinese, Ukrainian, etc. The text of the document can be compiled in two or more languages. The user can specify his own recognition language for each block of the type or for each cell of the table.

Intelligent recognition of PDF documents

As you know, some PDF files contain a so-called text layer, and its content may not fully correspond to the document visible on the screen. FineReader first analyzes the contents of the file and makes a decision for each block of text: to recognize it or extract the corresponding text from the text layer. Thus, it is possible to increase the recognition quality and reduce the processing time.

Recognition of digital photos of documents

Now for recognition it is not necessary to equip the computer with a scanner. ABBYY FineReader allows you to recognize photographs of documents taken digital camera (it is recommended to use digital camera with a matrix resolution of 4 Mpix and higher).

There are many cases when it is more convenient to use a camera than a scanner to obtain an image. For example, during a business meeting outside the office, when recognizing signs or notices, in a library, especially when working with thick or old books. Not to mention the fact that a digital camera works several times faster than any scanner.

Hyperlink recognition

Such documents can be saved in Microsoft Word, PDF and HTML formats. In addition, you can add your own hyperlinks to the recognized text.

When recognizing PDF files, in addition to external links, internal links are also restored (to other pages of the same document).

Screenshot recognition

The system delivery set includes ABBYY Screenshot Reader. It's simple and convenient application designed to recognize text from any area of \u200b\u200bthe screen. ABBYY Screenshot Reader converts into editable format such texts that cannot be copied in the usual way - system messages, captions in Flash movies, etc. Both the recognized text and the screenshot can be saved as a file or transferred to the clipboard.

Barcode recognition

ABBYY FineReader supports barcode recognition, including two-dimensional type PDF-417.