Innovative Background OCR and Optimised Interface Enable Users to Instantly Open Document of Any Length and Quickly Recognise Any Area on It

ABBYY®, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies and services, has announced FineReader 12, the newest version of its award-winning Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document conversion software application. FineReader 12 delivers enhanced performance for many processes and functions, including faster document conversion, the ability to quickly open documents of any length while OCR processing runs in the background, and instant recognition of a text or table area selected on the page. In addition, FineReader 12 offers enhanced accuracy for OCR on business documents and with Asian languages, as well as new image enhancement tools helping users to produce digital copies of documents with even higher visual quality than the originals.

“Serving as a bridge between paper and digital documents, OCR software is one of the essential tools to build an efficient working environment,” commented Ivan Bodyagin, director of the FineReader Desktop Products Department at ABBYY. “FineReader 12 was designed to provide a truly convenient way of digitising paper documents and working with the content — editing and quoting text, copying and reusing data, and adapting them for searchable archives.”

FineReader 12 delivers intuitive tools for scanning documents and converting images of documents into editable and searchable electronic formats such as Microsoft® Word, Excel®, PDF, TXT, popular e-book formats and more. ABBYY’s OCR technology delivers outstanding quality when “reading” printed text on documents in any of the 190 supported languages and their combinations. With its unique ABBYY Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ABBYY ADRT®), FineReader “understands” a document’s logical structure, re-creating even large, complex documents with their native formatting attributes (e.g. headers, footers, page numbering, table of contents, etc.) across all pages. FineReader 12 offers a number of powerful improvements, they include:

• Background OCR for Maximum Efficiency — FineReader 12 offers an innovative document conversion approach that enables users to open, view and start working with a document of any size immediately while it continues to be processed in the background. Unlike traditional approaches, which require a document be fully recognised before it is available for other actions, FineReader 12’s background OCR saves considerable time by providing access to all document pages at once. Additionally, FineReader 12 improves OCR processing speed up to 15 percent*.

• Easy Extraction of Data and Text Quotation — With its optimised interface and newly added controls, FineReader 12 enables users to easily copy a table or formatted text from any selected area without the need to recognise the entire document.

• Improved Accuracy on Business Documents — FineReader 12 includes a new tool for removing colour stamps and pen marks on scanned or photographed images, providing better recognition quality and improving the appearance of business documents. It also offers up to 30 percent* more accurate retention of charts and graphs and some other elements typical for business documents.

• Seamless Conversion of Tables — FineReader 12 improves table conversion by up to 40 percent*, saving engineers, financial professionals or other specialists significant time and effort when working with numerical data.

• Improved Accuracy for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Hebrew — FineReader 12 continues to lead the market in the OCR language support and features up to 15 percent improvement for Arabic OCR, up to 10 percent for Hebrew OCR, and up to 20 percent accuracy increase on Chinese, Japanese and Korean documents.

• Easier Saving and Retrieving Files from the Cloud — FineReader 12 provides easier access to popular cloud storages such as Google Drive™, Dropbox™, SkyDrive® and more. Plus, direct integration with Microsoft SharePoint® Online / Office 365™ further facilitates document sharing.

• Visual Quality Enhancement for Scans, Photos and PDF Documents — Improved ABBYY Camera OCR enables users to turn photos of documents into scanner-quality images, and offers new photo pre-processing functions such as auto crop of multiple images and whitening of the original document’s background. Additionally, the new PreciseScan technology from ABBYY smoothes pixelated characters on searchable PDFs, thus improving the visual quality of documents for easier reading, archiving or better printing results.

• Faster and Easier Verification & Correction — The enhanced verification tool now allows users to apply both spelling and formatting corrections, with intuitive hot keys and tab controls that make it easy to navigate through the verification process.

• Enhanced Hot Folder in FineReader 12 Corporate — Improved Hot Folder function for batch conversion of documents now speeds up overall conversion process, plus provides dual-core processing support. In addition, it offers more flexible naming options, allowing users to add prefixes and suffixes to file or folder names in order to better organise them.

• Compatible with Windows 8 — ABBYY FineReader 12 is fully compatible with Windows 8 and utilises the new options provided by the operating system, including the ability to use basic touch gestures to scroll and zoom on laptops with touch screens.

Availability

ABBYY FineReader 12 Professional is available immediately through various online stores, selected retail outlets and resellers worldwide. ABBYY FineReader 12 Corporate, designed to meet the needs of mid-to-large businesses and organisations, will become available later in 2014. For detailed product information, or to download a free trial version of the application, visit: http://finereader.abbyy.com .

*According to internal ABBYY testing. Accuracy and formatting results can vary depending on factors such as document quality and scanner settings.