Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

OCR – the process of converting printed matter into editable text – has been one of the best reasons to own a scanner—and you’ll be surprised at the time you can save. ABBYY Software House’s new FineReader OCR Professional 6.0 software ($299.99, $149.99 for upgrades) is what makes it possible to scan in an article from an old magazine, select a long passage, and turn it into editable text that can be incorporated into a report (remembering to manually add the source credit, of course).

ABBYY’s Web site says the product offers “unsurpassed accuracy.” I’m used to dismissing such puffery, but in the case of FineReader, it’s true. I tested several source documents – including a Web page printed on an HP DeskJet and several multi-column pages from magazines – and was surprised at how few conversion mistakes it made. . The accuracy rate was nothing short of remarkable. The program properly separated text from graphics, did an excellent job of converting text and graphics to a Word document, and did it quickly. In fact, in several source documents, it made no mistakes interpreting text whatsoever.

The Scan&Read wizard asks you to select the source (scanner or file – I used a scanner), then calls your scanner’s TWAIN interface. A step in the wizard triggers the display of your scanner’s TWAIN dialog box, where you its “Scan” button to scan the source; after the scan is done you automatically return to the FineReader wizard.

You can proof the document, during which FineReader points out suspicious areas that may need clarification and highlights misspelled words for your attention. You’ll then see FineReader’s three-panel workspace: the scanned document with areas marked to be converted (which areas the program should interpret as text, tables, or graphics), the proofing panel (questionable conversions are highlighted), and an enlarged picture of the scanned image (so you can compare the original to the converted text). The proofing panel and scanned image panel are kept in sync – highlight a highlighted area and FineReader shows you the corresponding section of the scanned image.

You can skip the proofing step if you wish and go straight to the output. I chose to convert the scanned documents to Word. You can also create a PDF (Adobe Acrobat), HTML, RTF, or Excel file. FineReader can even paste the text into the body of an e-mail message.

When saving to Word, you have three choices: retain all formatting, retain fonts and font formatting (e.g., italics), and remove all formatting. ABBYY says the program provides “impeccable layout retention.” That’s an overstatement. It’s very good, but it’s not up to impeccable in this release. The program’s biggest problem is that it can’t always use the same font as your source document, so it makes font substitutions (in my documents, to Times New Roman). The result is close, but in several documents the resulting headline font in Word was too large, affecting the entire layout. FineReader kept the proper number of columns and their approximate sizes, and it maintained the line breaks. It placed several graphics in the wrong place (which was easily corrected).

Still, even without maintaining the exact format of the original, FineReader comes very close. A scanned one-page, 2- or 3-column source document took about 20 seconds to interpret and another 3 seconds to turn into a Word file. If you have a multi-page document, you can use batch document support (enabling you to interpret all scanned pages at once, for example). Finally, because FineReader can recognize text in 122 languages, foreign phrases aren’t a problem.

Among the new features in this version: image-saving options that give you control over the quality and file size of graphic elements within recognized documents. You can adjust photo compression to between 20% and 90% (in 10% increments) when saving in HTML and PDF formats. In addition, you can select image resolution when saving in RTF, DOC, HTML and PDF formats (choosing options between 72 and 600 dpi).

You can create PDF files from your scanned images (making it a good tool for quickly converting paper documents into PDFs). Version 6 adds the ability to turn PDF files to editable text.

I was particularly impressed with how well FineReader works with low-cost scanners, which can be prone to adding artifacts to the scanned image. I used a Canon CanoScan N670U (with a USB interface, retailing for less than $100), and was very pleased with the overall results.

Installation is simple; the process adds a FineReader icon to your Word toolbar.

For more information visit: www.abbyyusa.com

-- James E. Powell

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