Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely Fabulous
Review: ABBYY FIneReader 5.0 Home Edition is an exceptionally valuable, high quality product a very affordable price. This program is as accurate as any other I have tried, costing far more. It is as easy to use as any other OCR software package out there, and is just as accurate. When considering the price is below ...[undisclosed dollar amount], you cannot go wrong with this product. I quit using TextBridge and Omni Page after trying this product. Those other programs cost three to five times more, and provide no greater productivity. Best ...[undisclosed dollar amount]I have never spent on software.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Fabulous
Review: ABBYY FIneReader 5.0 Home Edition is an exceptionally valuable, high quality product a very affordable price. This program is as accurate as any other I have tried, costing far more. It is as easy to use as any other OCR software package out there, and is just as accurate. When considering the price is below ...[undisclosed dollar amount], you cannot go wrong with this product. I quit using TextBridge and Omni Page after trying this product. Those other programs cost three to five times more, and provide no greater productivity. Best ...[undisclosed dollar amount]I have never spent on software.
Rating: 
Summary: FineReader 5.0 .. best thing since sliced bread for OCR
Review: Abbyy FineReader 5.0 is a great product beating the likes of OmniPage 6, and even more miserable TextBridge hands down (God, why does Epson package this miserable excuse for software with its scanners?). Well worth the money. There's a bit of a learning curve, but nothing too difficult to get the hang of.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as OCR gets -- so far
Review: About 5 years ago, I had a vision of converting all my magazine clippings and other research material to digital form so it would take up less room and be easier to find and consult. It took at long time to find the hardware and software to convert from vision to reality and OCR was the hardest part. FineReader is the only OCR package that could fill the bill, and I've tried them all! Compared to earlier versions, FR 5 is more stable, more capable on difficult scans, and more flexible in its features. On ordinary-hard material it will do the whole thing without intervention and with good accuracy. When the scan copy is really poor or exceptionally complex, or when the ultimate in accuracy is critical, then some hand editing of the recognition blocks and/or hand correction of the results is called for -- but FR 5 makes it as easy as possible. I do a lot of scanning of statistical data in tables and its abilities for this are truly amazing. For my purposes I need to save the output to a PDF file, and until OmniPage 11 (more expensive and not nearly as good as FR), FR was the only consumer-oriented package that would do this in one step. It's a huge advantage. Limitations? There are some: It "loses" my HP 6250 USB scanner sometimes (which may be a problem on the scanner end, of course). There's no control over how much it compresses images -- too much for good quality. Its ability to handle equations is very limited. It has trouble with "old-style" (non-lining) numerals. If it mistakenly recognizes something as numerical it won't let you correct it to alphabetical or vice versa. There's no way to force it to recognize everything in a block as numerical (as would be helpful sometimes for tables). It's a bit slower than FR 4 (due, I presume, to more sophisticated recognition algorithms). The user-interface is fairly complicated (unless you simply use the auto modes) -- but no more than is necessary for this very powerful package with its many options. While I'd love to see ABBYY work on all these areas, I'm absolutely convinced that they are the only people who have any idea how to make an OCR package fit for adults. If you need OCR, you need FineReader 5.0.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Good Desktop OCR Product
Review: After looking around the Internet for information on affordable PC desktop OCR products, it seemed clear to me that Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro" was probably the best product for my needs. I have not been disappointed. I read a lot of negative "press" about OCR capabilities in general and I was not impressed by the OCR software bundled with my Canon 620P Scanner. You should also keep in mind that this was my first experience with any kind of OCR software. My immediate requirement was to translate a five year-old, 57 page document to MS Word, so that it could be updated. The source document was lost sometime in the past. As a consequence, no one was interested in starting "from scratch" to update the document. The survivng hardcopy of the document was produced by a laser printer in black and white on 8 1/2 by 11 plain paper. The content consisted of text, logos, graphics, and a number of simple tables. It took me approximately 2.5 hours to scan the entire document and about 2 days, full time, to complete the project. This time estimate includes the time to get familiar with the program. Without counting the total number of words in the document, I would estimate that FineReader was 99% accurate translating the text. The only place it had any difficulty was in procesing some of the section header numbers in the table of contents (TOC). For exampe, the program translated the image "8.x" to "&.x" in several instances and also confused "I"s and "1"s several times. Given the italicized font of the characters images and the errors are easy to understand. The few errors I did find were quickly identified and easily corrected manually in MS Word. Tables took a little more manual work. FineReader's layout analysis logic had no problem identifying all of the tables, but, as noted in the software documentation, the program may not always be able to convert table cells with multiple lines of text and preserve the table row and column alignment of the orignal document. In my case, these problems were easy to fix using the column and row identifier tool provided in the software. Once I marked the location of rows and columns on the scanned image of the table, the tables were translated correctly, requiring only minor editing "touch-up" to align text in table cells to match the original document. The only problem I have encountered with this software product was the result of the distribution package I received. Abbyy offers a "try and buy" distribution that consists of a 3.5" floppy diskette and a CD-ROM. The combination of media provides copy protection and is not problem unless, like me, you have a laptop PC that can support either a CD-ROM or a 3.5" floppy diskette, but not both at the same time. In short, I called Abbyy's technical support line and they told to return the floppy diskette and CD-ROM to them and they would send me a single CD-ROM. I isntalled and used the single CD-ROM I received from the vendor with no further problems. The "message" is that you should make sure you understand which distribution of the software you are purchasing. The box did state, in the system requirements section, that the program required a 3.5" diskette and a CD-ROM drive. I did not deduce, however, that both devices were required concurrently. The manual that came with my distribution was entirely adequate for my purposes, suffering only from the occasional grammatical problem common to many manuals for products developed in countries where English is not the native language. (FineReader was developed by Abbyy, a Russian company with headquarters in Moscow.) I am an experienced computer user and typically install a new software product and then try to use it immediately without bothering to read the documentation. I believe you could take this approach with FineReader, but I recommend reading the documentation first, particularly, if, like me, you are not familiar with the basic flow of the OCR process. The manual isn't that long and you probably won't need to read all of it, to get enough information to starting using FineReader productively. Because I am not an experienced OCR user, I am reluctant to say that this product will meet the needs of everyone or every job. I was delighted, however, with what the product was able to do for me. As I said at the beginning of my comments, I was not disappointed by Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro".
Rating:
Summary: beware of patches on website for NEW software
Review: After looking around the Internet for information on affordable PC desktop OCR products, it seemed clear to me that Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro" was probably the best product for my needs. I have not been disappointed. I read a lot of negative "press" about OCR capabilities in general and I was not impressed by the OCR software bundled with my Canon 620P Scanner. You should also keep in mind that this was my first experience with any kind of OCR software. My immediate requirement was to translate a five year-old, 57 page document to MS Word, so that it could be updated. The source document was lost sometime in the past. As a consequence, no one was interested in starting "from scratch" to update the document. The survivng hardcopy of the document was produced by a laser printer in black and white on 8 1/2 by 11 plain paper. The content consisted of text, logos, graphics, and a number of simple tables. It took me approximately 2.5 hours to scan the entire document and about 2 days, full time, to complete the project. This time estimate includes the time to get familiar with the program. Without counting the total number of words in the document, I would estimate that FineReader was 99% accurate translating the text. The only place it had any difficulty was in procesing some of the section header numbers in the table of contents (TOC). For exampe, the program translated the image "8.x" to "&.x" in several instances and also confused "I"s and "1"s several times. Given the italicized font of the characters images and the errors are easy to understand. The few errors I did find were quickly identified and easily corrected manually in MS Word. Tables took a little more manual work. FineReader's layout analysis logic had no problem identifying all of the tables, but, as noted in the software documentation, the program may not always be able to convert table cells with multiple lines of text and preserve the table row and column alignment of the orignal document. In my case, these problems were easy to fix using the column and row identifier tool provided in the software. Once I marked the location of rows and columns on the scanned image of the table, the tables were translated correctly, requiring only minor editing "touch-up" to align text in table cells to match the original document. The only problem I have encountered with this software product was the result of the distribution package I received. Abbyy offers a "try and buy" distribution that consists of a 3.5" floppy diskette and a CD-ROM. The combination of media provides copy protection and is not problem unless, like me, you have a laptop PC that can support either a CD-ROM or a 3.5" floppy diskette, but not both at the same time. In short, I called Abbyy's technical support line and they told to return the floppy diskette and CD-ROM to them and they would send me a single CD-ROM. I isntalled and used the single CD-ROM I received from the vendor with no further problems. The "message" is that you should make sure you understand which distribution of the software you are purchasing. The box did state, in the system requirements section, that the program required a 3.5" diskette and a CD-ROM drive. I did not deduce, however, that both devices were required concurrently. The manual that came with my distribution was entirely adequate for my purposes, suffering only from the occasional grammatical problem common to many manuals for products developed in countries where English is not the native language. (FineReader was developed by Abbyy, a Russian company with headquarters in Moscow.) I am an experienced computer user and typically install a new software product and then try to use it immediately without bothering to read the documentation. I believe you could take this approach with FineReader, but I recommend reading the documentation first, particularly, if, like me, you are not familiar with the basic flow of the OCR process. The manual isn't that long and you probably won't need to read all of it, to get enough information to starting using FineReader productively. Because I am not an experienced OCR user, I am reluctant to say that this product will meet the needs of everyone or every job. I was delighted, however, with what the product was able to do for me. As I said at the beginning of my comments, I was not disappointed by Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro".
Rating:
Summary: A Very Good Desktop OCR Product
Review: After looking around the Internet for information on affordable PC desktop OCR products, it seemed clear to me that Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro" was probably the best product for my needs. I have not been disappointed. I read a lot of negative "press" about OCR capabilities in general and I was not impressed by the OCR software bundled with my Canon 620P Scanner. You should also keep in mind that this was my first experience with any kind of OCR software. My immediate requirement was to translate a five year-old, 57 page document to MS Word, so that it could be updated. The source document was lost sometime in the past. As a consequence, no one was interested in starting "from scratch" to update the document. The survivng hardcopy of the document was produced by a laser printer in black and white on 8 1/2 by 11 plain paper. The content consisted of text, logos, graphics, and a number of simple tables. It took me approximately 2.5 hours to scan the entire document and about 2 days, full time, to complete the project. This time estimate includes the time to get familiar with the program. Without counting the total number of words in the document, I would estimate that FineReader was 99% accurate translating the text. The only place it had any difficulty was in procesing some of the section header numbers in the table of contents (TOC). For exampe, the program translated the image "8.x" to "&.x" in several instances and also confused "I"s and "1"s several times. Given the italicized font of the characters images and the errors are easy to understand. The few errors I did find were quickly identified and easily corrected manually in MS Word. Tables took a little more manual work. FineReader's layout analysis logic had no problem identifying all of the tables, but, as noted in the software documentation, the program may not always be able to convert table cells with multiple lines of text and preserve the table row and column alignment of the orignal document. In my case, these problems were easy to fix using the column and row identifier tool provided in the software. Once I marked the location of rows and columns on the scanned image of the table, the tables were translated correctly, requiring only minor editing "touch-up" to align text in table cells to match the original document. The only problem I have encountered with this software product was the result of the distribution package I received. Abbyy offers a "try and buy" distribution that consists of a 3.5" floppy diskette and a CD-ROM. The combination of media provides copy protection and is not problem unless, like me, you have a laptop PC that can support either a CD-ROM or a 3.5" floppy diskette, but not both at the same time. In short, I called Abbyy's technical support line and they told to return the floppy diskette and CD-ROM to them and they would send me a single CD-ROM. I isntalled and used the single CD-ROM I received from the vendor with no further problems. The "message" is that you should make sure you understand which distribution of the software you are purchasing. The box did state, in the system requirements section, that the program required a 3.5" diskette and a CD-ROM drive. I did not deduce, however, that both devices were required concurrently. The manual that came with my distribution was entirely adequate for my purposes, suffering only from the occasional grammatical problem common to many manuals for products developed in countries where English is not the native language. (FineReader was developed by Abbyy, a Russian company with headquarters in Moscow.) I am an experienced computer user and typically install a new software product and then try to use it immediately without bothering to read the documentation. I believe you could take this approach with FineReader, but I recommend reading the documentation first, particularly, if, like me, you are not familiar with the basic flow of the OCR process. The manual isn't that long and you probably won't need to read all of it, to get enough information to starting using FineReader productively. Because I am not an experienced OCR user, I am reluctant to say that this product will meet the needs of everyone or every job. I was delighted, however, with what the product was able to do for me. As I said at the beginning of my comments, I was not disappointed by Abbyy's "FineReader 5.0 Pro".
Rating:
Summary: Great OCR Software
Review: Compared to the American-produced products I have seen in the past, this is a major step forward. Very high accuracy in a wide range of languages. My only beefs are two: that it would be nice to have a feature to help to deal with double-sided pages fed through an automatic document feeder, and, that it would be nice to be able to output directly to WordPerfect and maybe some dtp programs. Otherwise, hard to see how it could get much better.
Rating:
Summary: See for yourself...
Review: I bought Scansoft Textbridge Pro Millennium (...) at a physical store and was REALLY dissatisfied with the results of even simple scans. It was certainly NO better than the Presto PageManager 98 that came with my Epson 1200U scanner. THEN I went and read the reviews of the product here on Amazon. OOPS! I would never have purchased it if I'd read the reviews here first! When will I learn to check Amazon before I buy anything? Fortunately, the publisher agreed to accept a return. Then I purchased ABBY FineReader 5.0 from Amazon. Well, the differences between it and Textbridge were ASTOUNDING! In side-by-side tests of a scanned newspaper article, FineReader reproduced it perfectly as an MS Word file. Textbridge's OCR engine made a jumbled mess of it all.
Rating:
Summary: Caution!
Review: I bought this instead of an upgrade for my old Omnipage, because of the reviews I read here. Bad mistake! It comes with an odd-ball install program that incorporates both a floppy disk and a CD. It was impossible to install the program from the floppy disk, because the floppy-disk install program crashed my system every time I tried. The manufacturer did not respond to my email request for assistance. It was possible to install from the CD, but that installation is for a trial period only, after which the program presumably goes dormant until you re-purchase it. I returned the software for a refund of my purchase price.
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