ABBYY FineReader 11- Fast and Accurate OCR, Now simplifies e-book creation too !

“Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that enables conversion of images, received from scanner or digital camera, and PDFs to editable and searchable text documents ready for editing, quoting, search, and archiving.”

ABBYY FineReader 11 OCR software with lots of cool features creates editable, searchable files and e-books from scans, PDFs and digital photographs.This version takes the productivity to a new level with a significant enhancement in OCR performance, including a new black-and-white mode that increases document processing speed. This also supports creation of electronic books in the most popular formats. 

Some of the new features of ABBYY FineReader 11 are -

OCR Speed Boost and Powerful Productivity tools - ABBYY FineReader 11 delivers an overall increase of processing speed. FineReader 11 performance can be further boosted by its dedicated processing modes:

• Black & White Processing Mode – Normally for documents as newspaper, books etc where color is not needed, this mode results upto 45 percent faster processing with high accuracy.
• Enhanced Fast Processing Mode - Provides up to 70 percent faster recognition as compared to the default processing mode. This option is perfectly suited for projects where speed is critical, such as creating searchable PDF archives.

Creation of e-books made simpler-

One of the new features I liked was creation of e-books made simpler and support for popular formats like ePub. You even have an option to send the converted text directly to the user’s Amazon Kindle account.

More accurate – Speed is not the only criteria, even with speed enhancements, FineReader 11 provides more accurate reconstruction of the document’s original formatting, including table of contents, headers and footers and other attributes commonly found in multipage documents. The new version delivers significant improvements in the detection of vertical headers, as well as margin notes, diagrams, tables, and styles, minimizing the effort typically required for manual correction.

In addition to Microsoft Word documents, ABBYY FineReader 11 now accurately re-creates headers, footers, page numbering and table of contents across all pages in resulting OpenOffice.org Writer (ODT) files. When saving to PDF, the application intelligently identifies and reproduces the document’s content outline bookmarks with live links for better navigating and reading.

ABBYY FineReader 11 offers an improved, flexible user interface that helps users achieve faster results when working with documents:

• Document Splitting : When split, documents can be processed simultaneously in separate FineReader windows for better quality of the results
• New Style Editor : Allows users to view, change or merge the text styles across an entire document
• Enhanced Image Editor :
• Intuitive PDF Conversion Options : Provides 3 pre-defined modes for PDF saving — Maximum Quality, Compact Size and Balanced

So these were the some of the highlights of the new features in ABBYY FineReader11 Professional Ed. I have been using it since some time and I’m happy with its speed and accuracy.

There’s also ABBYY FineReader 11 Corporate Edition which also has been enhanced and provides-

•   Enhanced Hot Folder and Scheduling -

“Performing automated batch processing from “watched” folders (mailbox, local or network folders) the application can now flexibly schedule document conversion routines initiating the processes with pre-defined intervals (every minute, day, week or month).”

• Removal of Sensitive Information -

Allows users to blackout and remove sensitive information in supported output documents. Confidential information can be removed and replaced with blackout bar

• ABBYY Business Card Reader -

A time-saving application that allows users of ABBYY FineReader 11 Corporate Edition to quickly and accurately convert scanned business cards and save the extracted data in vCard format or directly to Microsoft Outlook contacts.

These are some of the well thought out enhancements to the Corporate Ed.

ABBYY Fine Reader also installs another very useful tool ABBYY Screenshot Reader. They had some promotional offer to get this Screenshot Reader for Free, about which I had posted earlier, the offer is still on there to grab.

For more information and to try ABBYY FineReader 11, Please check - http://finereader.abbyy.com/