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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.
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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: A solid product
Review: This program is not perfect, but does a real good job most of the time. The interface is straight-forward and it is pretty fast. I would purchase this product again.
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Summary: Awesome product...stinky customer support
Review: I bought this software, primarily on the basis of the reviews on Amazon. It installed easily...and I should note that although I've used several scanning packages, this is the first one I've bought. The capabilities of the software are truely awesome...some real virtuousity is clearly evident. Tables and text scan easily and flawlessly into every kind of file I can think of. Amazing. The problem I have with Finereader 5.0 Pro it is really two-fold. First, the manual is pathetic...nowhere would one discover how to use the product, much less what it is capable of delivering, if s/he relied on the manual. It just doesn't make sense and has loads of omissions. Second, the email support is literally useless...I don't really think there is anything but an email address at the other end... No response, at all. I was about 15 minutes from returning the whole box when I tried something completely illogical to change the scanner settings, when, Voila! The thing started working. Whatever, you do...don't rely on the manual. A good technical writer with several weeks' experience with this package could earn this company a lot of grateful and loyal customers. Are you ABBYY guys listening?
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: Awesome.
Review: Not a term I use too often, but prior to getting my hands on Abbyy's FineReader 5.0 Pro I was always under the impression that OCR software was a joke; an opinion bolstered by mine and others' experience of applications like Text-Bridge. Not FineReader. This stuff is in its ability to convert scanned documents into text files that can then be formatted in your word-processor. With FineReader 5.0 Pro I can do what would take me over a week - assuming I didn't go loopy in the process of transcribing it - in under an hour; converting about 20,000.00 words worth, into a useable MS-Word or RTF file. FineReader makes very few mistakes. Some worth mentioning are the following: Text hyphenated in order to allow a word to wrap in the original: This will give word splits with optional-hyphen symbols that will have to taken out individually in your word-processor file. Quotation marks will default to text-editor style without any left and right handing: This can be corrected globally in a given document by ( in MS- Word ) using the replace all function and entering the normal quotation marks in the find and replace boxes. This applies to both single and double quotes. Text set in columns with cross-column footnotes will create a line or two of rubbish, but the columns will be successfully interpreted as a single one in your word-processor document, providing you remember to save the processed file without any formatting. I reckon you should save all processed files without retaining the original formatting to make life easier. You can also output a processed file as a PDF and an HTML page. Be sure to consider the settings for these export options, otherwise you can end up with an enormous PDF or an HTML page that won't work in older browsers. I would also encourage a user to dispense with all the Wizard toolbars and get familiar with the commands via the menu bar. This is a better and more flexible way to work, and potentially less confusing. And buy a decent scanner, too. Epson do good ones such as their perfection series. If you want an OCR application that really works, get FineReader 5.0 Pro. You'll recoup its incredibly modest cost in one job.
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Summary: The BEST OCR at the BEST PRICE
Review: I've owned several different OCR programs (since the inception of OCR), Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Pro OCR is the best one I've ever used. I use it for reading both English and Greek, it is flawless. It is especially good at reading (flawlessly) small fonts (I've tested it on 8 pt. and newspaper articles). I can copy dual pages from books, and it will automatically format them in portrait, again flawlessly. This is the first OCR software I've had that requires only minor editing (only format, never extra wierd characters). I suspect the great price is because v.6 is being released.
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Summary: beware of patches on website for NEW software
Review: I wish I had checked out the Abbyy website before I bought this. I might have been tipped off to potential problems if I had noticed not one but two separate patches to make this version work on my relatively new computer. But I didn't, and all I saw were the glowing reviews on Amazon. I have a standard, new-ish computer, and above-avg skills. I cannot get this program to work at all. The patches have been installed multiple times, and the program itself has been installed & reinstalled multiple times. Here's the worst part, however: emails to the company get nowhere. I've emailed several different addresses w/in the company, as indicated on the website, and have gotten no where. Their junk emails to me get well enough, though. I've tried to call, but never seem to hit any time when a person is there. Go figure. The upshot: don't get ripped off by this company. Once they have your money, they do not give a rat's behind whether the product works. Who knows? Maybe it really did work for all of the other people who reviewed it on this site. But I'm a little skeptical...I don't remember if anyone mentioned patches in their reviews. And I don't believe it is possible to install this program, on any machine no matter how old, w/o downloading a patch from the ABBYY website. My ultimate review: RUN LIKE THE WIND FROM THIS PRODUCT.
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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: 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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