For files of this kind, FineReader will produce OCR output and Acrobat won’t. In my informal tests, Acrobat’s OCR consistently produced less reliable results than FineReader’s, and Acrobat completely refuses to perform OCR on PDF files that have “mixed” content, meaning PDFs that combine the actual image with text inserted by software-for example, the page address and other information inserted by a web browser when you save a web page to PDF. AcrobatEven if you use Adobe Acrobat for most PDF management tasks, it’s worth using FineReader instead of Acrobat for OCR functions. Law firms and government offices that still use WordPerfect will be glad to know that FineReader is the only current OCR software that can output text to WordPerfect for Windows.ĪBBYY Vs. I make heavy use of that feature to convert unsearchable PDFs-for example, out-of-copyright books downloaded from Google Books-into searchable PDFs, but you could also use it to create PDFs or Microsoft Office documents from image files. The Corporate version of ABBYY FineReader 11, which I tested, expands on the Professional version by including a hot-folder feature that lets you simply drop files into a folder that you designate, and then wait a few moments while FineReader runs invisibly in the background, automatically performing OCR on the dropped files. I’ve used it for years in preference to all alternatives, and the latest version is its best by far. And if you often need to copy text from images found on the Web, you need to get the most accurate possible text out of images on your disk or documents that you’ve fed to a scanner, or you want to convert a scanned document into HTML or into the ePub format used by e-readers, the app that gets those jobs done best, too, is ABBYY FineReader.

But if you need OCR that can handle difficult and massive jobs like converting complex tables into usable spreadsheets, or scanning a hundred-year-old book into a searchable PDF, or getting accurate text out of pages printed with weird-looking typefaces, you need ABBYY FineReader 11. Why upgrade to ABBYY FineReader 11 ($279.99 direct Professional Edition $118.99)? After all, your scanner probably came with an optical character recognition (OCR) app on a CD, and that app is probably good enough for everyday OCR jobs like scanning business cards, magazine clippings, invoices, and old letters.

Use abbyy finereader 11