ABBYY FineReader
Description
You may have experienced the pain of trying to extract text in a scanned document using a simple free tool and that is likely to be quite painful. One-half the words are garbled, the tables are no longer structured and you have to retype everything anyway. It is precisely that frustration that makes ABBYY FineReader so useful, and frankly, it does the job better than most of the other options that I have encountered.
ABBYY FineReader is a PDF and OCR program developed by ABBYY, a company based in Austin, Texas that has operated in document recognition business since 1989. The software transforms scanned pages, photos of documents and image-based PDFs into the formats you can actually use, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, searchable PDF and many more. It is also a complete PDF editor, allowing you to annotate, redact, sign and rearrange pages without having to switch to a different application.
FineReader is most reputable in the OCR engine. It has more than 190 languages and can deal with messy inputs quite well. I have tossed away expired receipts, outdated technical manuals, and even photographed whiteboards at it and the outcomes were usable most of the time. Complex structures with columns, headers and embedded pictures are not likely to be lost in the conversion process and that cannot be said of all the OCR tools available in the market.
The experience of editing after conversion is one of the things I like. You are able to edit sentences, change paragraph spacing and manipulate table cells in the converted output without ruining the original formatting. It is not as smooth as working in Microsoft Word, but there are some alignment peculiarities, but it is close enough to do most professional work.
Another feature of FineReader that I did not anticipate using as much as I do is document comparison. You give it two copies of a contract or a report, and it points out all the differences, even between formats. To be able to compare a scanned printout to a digital Word file and identify any changes that someone may have sneaked in. To any person handling legal or compliance documents, that would be enough to warrant the purchase.
The software is not cheap on the downside. Standard license costs approximately 199 and the Corporate edition costs approximately 399. It also has a subscription plan of about 16 dollars a month. To a casual user who only requires OCR once or twice a month, such a price is difficult to digest when there are free alternatives, even when they are clearly inferior.
Mobile support is another weakness. Although it has companion apps on iOS, the desktop version is the flagship product and you will not have the full feature set on a phone or tablet.
It is also possible that performance is not consistent based on your hardware and the complexity of what you are processing. Hundreds of pages in a batch job perform well on a decent computer, but the search feature within the huge documents is slow at times. Some users also complain of occasional freezes when performing heavy OCR tasks, but I have not encountered this.
Who then should buy this? When you need to scan or otherwise work with a lot of images in your work, and you need to convert it into a workable file – translators, lawyers, archivists, administrative workers, etc. – FineReader is one of the most powerful tools. Assuming that you only have to extract text in a PDF once a few times a month, then you are likely to be fine with a free tool and a lot of patience.
