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New ABBYY FineReader 10

By Paul Nisbet on Monday 18th January, 2010 at 5:27pm

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A new version of FineReader has just been released and the basic OCR accuracy seems to be much better than the previous version 9 (which was actually much worse than version 8 - we carried on using 8 because 9 was so bad). Here's a screenshot of a PDF image that was recognised using FineReader 9:

1 . L J n e m i c a i R e a c t i o n s • When chemicals are mixed together, they LIW i i u i a i w a p ltati. I I U W L V U , WHUII a chemical reaction does take place, there may be one, or more, of the following: - CI LU1UUL VllClll^L - the appearance of a s o l i d (precipitate) - a f i z z i n g as a gas forms - a temperature change

As you can see (and also hear, if you are using a screen reader), the recognition is pretty poor. Try right-clicking on the image and reading the alt text to see how bad it is.

Here's the same PDF page, opened and recognised using FineReader 10:

1. Chemical Reactions • When chemicals are mixed together, they do not always react. However, when a chemical reaction does take place, there may be one, or more, of the following: - a colour change - the appearance of a solid (precipitate) - a fizzing as a gas forms - a temperature change

Much better! I've not had time to explore FineReader 10 in detail, but the user interface also seems cleaner and more intuitive. So all in all if you're struggling with FineReader 9 it might be worth upgrading to version 10.

You can try a 15 day trial copy from Abbyy and buy the program for about £69 from suppliers like iANSYST.

Happy scanning!

Tags:

Books for All
accessible formats
eBooks
scanning
OCR

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Comments

#1. Philip Whittaker - Wednesday 27th January, 2010 at 1:40pm

Dear Paul,

That's great information to know. There have been a lot of problems with OCR software over the years, not being as good as they claimed. For example it was not until version 8 of Abbyy fine reader came out that there was reliable recognition of accented characters in modern European languages. This was claimed by Abbyy version 7 and other OCR packages at the time but did not work!

It's good that someone is doing a continuing evaluation of this software and keeping us informed. Thanks for the information about version 9 - no doubt being offered cheap somewhere, at this moment.

Well done.

PW

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