ABBYY Fine reader – the best and the worst OCR
Which is the best OCR software in the world. Which is the most annoying to install on a stand-alone system? The same one, I think.
OCR Software is pretty essential when you are creating accessibile texts for user with disabilities; visually impaired, motor impaired, dyslexic. There will be a document, probably prepared using a computer but the original file has been lost. OCR can help you reconstitute the document.
Four years ago iansys.com were very helpful in doing a comparative review of OCR software available at the time. It was fascinating. It emerged that Abby Fine reader was the best available. However, none of the packages did everything they said they could. The developers ticked their own boxes. In a particular all the packages failed to recognise correctly texts in European languages which use accents or non standard characters; ß, Ñ, François etc.
Abbyy Fine reader got this right in version 8 and I have stuck with them since. I’d be interested in anyone else’s recent experiences. Is Abbyy in fact still the best?
However, if you want to install it in a stand alone system, be prepared to waste a lot of time. There are on line forms and you can send an email to a server, but these do not work. Only sending an email to European support brought a helpful answer from a Norwegian support person. You can also run up phone charges to Holland on a support call. As I recall, they speak pretty good English on that helpline too.
The next problem is that you are sent an activation code with 78 characters. Yes, 78. Here is an example of what it might look like! Is this really necessary?
697973-930566-558156-627071-318120-962720-622555-687533-155011-784308-108480-936009-983444
