Abbyy Fine Reader 7 Pro

For this version of its OCR (optical character recognition) package, Fine Reader 7, Abbyy claims a 25 per cent improvement in accuracy, but it is the two additional features that are likely to be of real value.

First is recognition of read-only pdfs, which means you can use Fine Reader as a pdf editing tool and save the resulting text back to pdf. The second is increased integration with Office apps, which makes it easier to insert text into Word from a number of scanned and recognised documents and provides an embedded view of your original scan for quick reference while you are editing.

The easy-to-use interface makes scanning a document, converting it to editable text, using the spellcheck tool and saving it to file a walk in the park. There are a number of text editing and image management options which help save time on quick, straightforward jobs.

In our tests Fine Reader automatically read documents scanned in upside down and coped well with tables. It also did a good job reading multi-column text, a task that OCR packages traditionally find challenging. Fine Reader managed near-100 per cent text accuracy on our test colour scan, retaining column formats and placing embedded images in the resulting Word document.

You can save your project to image file formats including jpg, tif and bmp, as well as Powerpoint, XML and HTML.

This is an impressive package that will save a considerable amount of time and frustration.

Contact: Abbyy 01279 656 539
www.abbyy.com

System requirements:

• 200MHz or faster processor
• Windows 98 or later
• 64MB of Ram for Windows XP/2000/NT and 32MB of Ram for Windows ME/98
• 220MB hard disk space