ABBYY FineReader 7

One of the most useful things you can do with a scanner is archive old documents, such as newspaper cuttings and typed letters. Storing text documents as images, however, takes up a lot of hard disk space and limits what you can do with the documents afterwards.

The solution is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, such as ABBYY FineReader. It analyses scanned images for text and converts it into an editable text document. Any unrecognised text is highlighted and can be changed.

In our tests, FineReader picked up text over multiple pages, was able to recognise text within tables and was good at keeping the original document formatting. The process isn't infallible though, as having to manually remove spaces in words was commonplace. It supports many languages and comes with legal and medical dictionaries, so it's rare that it doesn't make at least one recommendation for an unrecognised word.

Text extraction can be performed by scanning or by opening an image file or PDF document in the FineReader software. Although there are no wizards to guide you through, FineReader is easy to use and reasonably priced.

Contact: ABBYY UK 01279 656539
www.abbyy.co.uk