Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abby Fine Reader Sprint 8.0

Abbyy Fine Reader Sprint 8.0 Included in software bundle with the following models: Stylus SX125/ SX218/ SX420W/ SX425W/ SX525WD/ SX620FW, Stylus Photo PX720WD/ PX820FWD Via Abbyy Fine Reader Sprint (Version: 8), When I try to open or scan files, the application fails or crashes to open. Find Serial Number notice: ABBYY FineReader 5 Pro. Serial number, ABBYY FineReader 5 Pro. All version keygen, ABBYY FineReader 5 Pro. Activation key, crack - may give false results or no results in search terms.

  1. Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abbyy Finereader Sprint 8.0
  2. Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abbyy Finereader Sprint 8.0 Update List
  3. Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abbyy Finereader Sprint 8.0 Update
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$99.99
  • Pros

    Most powerful and efficient OCR software available for OS X. Highly accurate character recognition and page-layout analysis. Wide range of output options for documents and ePub formats.

  • Cons

    Lacks the built-in proofreader in the Windows version.

  • Bottom Line

    It's been a long time the Mac had flexible, powerful OCR software. FineReader lacks a built-in proofreader, but in every other way it's by far the best choice for OS X.

In almost everything related to graphics, OS X apps tend to be more flexible and more powerful than anything you can find in Windows, with one major exception: Optical-character-reading (OCR) software for Windows has always been more powerful than Mac-based OCR apps. Now that Abbyy's FineReader Pro ($99.99) has arrived for the Mac, it's still true that Windows has better OCR software, but that's only because Abbyy's Windows-based OCR app, Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional Edition, is even more powerful than its Mac-based OCR app. Abbyy's apps are now are our Editors' Choice OCR products for both Windows and OS X, but the OS X version hasn't caught up with all the features in the Windows version.

  • $499.99
  • $49.95
  • $99.99

It's All About the OCR
Like all Abbyy's products, FineReader Pro uses the best OCR engine on the market. Whether the app reads pages from a scanner or from pictures or PDF files on your disk, it does a spectacularly good job of extracting text, arranging tables, and preserving layout.

FineReader Pro outputs editable documents in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, plain text, and e-book formats—and these documents typically require only a minimum of editing to correct any mistakes the app made in reading the original text or layout. It also outputs PDF files that display either clean text instead of the original scanned image of the text, or with searchable invisible text hidden under the original picture so you get the combined benefits of accurate appearance and searchable text.

Getting Started
You can use FineReader Pro either in its automated mode or in a mode that lets you adjust its settings at each stage of its operation. In automated mode, you simply choose an operation from the opening menu and let the program do its work—for example. On the left-hand side of the opening menu, you select a source—either your scanner or a file on your disk. On the right-hand side, you choose an automated operation, such as 'Convert to Excel Spreadsheet.' A gear icon next to the name of the automated operation lets you specify some basic output options, such as image quality and whether to use CSS styles in creating HTML pages. After a few seconds, the program prompts you for an output location and file name, and your output document is written to disk.

If you perform a manual operation, you first import pictures or scanned pages into a FineReader Pro document which you can modify for best results. An image editor lets you deskew images, erase or crop out parts of an image that you don't want, adjust perspective, color, and brightness and much else. The app then analyzes each page image to detect text, pictures, and tables. If, as sometimes happen with scans or pictures of printed material, the app misidentifies a smudge as a picture, or plain text as a table, use an Inspector panel to remove the smudge from the output or mark the text properly as text, not table. Then you tell the app to read the pages, and then, when you export the final document, you can fine-tune output options so that you preserve the original page layout or simply export text.

As in the Windows version, FineReader Pro's OCR engine is exceptionally accurate, producing flawless results from clean copy, and excellent results even from smudgy xeroxes of old books and typescripts. Its table-recognition engine is extraordinarily effective, even though it sometimes failed to detect thin border lines and I had to reapply the border lines when opening the output in Excel or Apple's Numbers app.

Not Mistake-Proof
Despite these exceptional abilities, FineReader Pro still doesn't equal its Windows counterpart, because it lacks the Windows' version proofreading feature. In the Windows version, you can open a small editing window and check every doubtful detail in the recognized text, deleting specks that were misrecognized as letters or numbers, removing italicization, and correcting spelling. This feature is completely absent from the Mac version, so you have to perform all corrections in the target app—Word, Excel, or anything else.

One downside of this lack is that you can't correct the output before exporting it as a PDF. If you want to create a PDF with corrected output, you'll need to export the document to Word or Excel, make corrections there, and then export the corrected document to PDF. When you export a file, a checkbox lets you tell the app to highlight characters that it's doubtful about so that you can find them quickly in the output document, but this means you'll have to remove the highlighting after making corrections. In the Windows version, you can do all this without exiting the OCR app.

The menu structure in FineReader Pro could also use some fine-tuning. When I performed step-by-step OCR, after importing pages from my scanner, I went to the Page menu and clicked 'Read page,' at the top of the menu, in order to convert the image into text. But the app gave me an error message saying that the page had not been processed yet. My mistake was that I should have clicked 'Analyze page' before clicking 'Read page.' But 'Analyze page' is lower down on the Page menu than 'Read page' so I didn't realize that I should start with it.

The Best for Mac
Despite these minor first-version problems, Abbyy's FineReader Pro is the only serious choice for OCR on a Mac. FineReader Pros' OCR engine outclasses anything else available, and its overall design is clean, efficient, and fast. It's our no-contest Editors' Choice for OCR under OS X.

Abbyy FineReader Pro (for Mac)

Bottom Line: It's been a long time the Mac had flexible, powerful OCR software. FineReader lacks a built-in proofreader, but in every other way it's by far the best choice for OS X.

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A very common request that I get here at DocumentSnap is to compare the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of ABBYY FineReader with Adobe Acrobat. Why? Well, for starters, both of them come included with models the Fujitsu ScanSnap as well as other scanners.

I decided to do a quick test comparing the OCR of the two packages using the following criteria:

  • OCR Speed
  • Resulting File Size
  • Accuracy

The Hardware

For a scanner I used my ScanSnap S1300.

I used two computers for the test:

  • Windows: A new cheap Acer laptop with a Core i3 2.40 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM running Windows 7
  • Mac: An old 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM running Mac OS X Snow Leopard

The Software

Here are the packages I used:

  • Windows: ABBYY FineReader For ScanSnap 4.1 (called from ScanSnap Manager) vs. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
  • Mac: ABBYY FineReader For ScanSnap 4.1 (run standalone) vs. Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro

Yes, I realize that Adobe Acrobat X is out, but since I am not aware of any scanners that come bundled with it yet, I decided to stick with the versions that ship with the ScanSnap. I’ll update Acrobat X in a later post.

The Document

I scanned a magazine article for this test. It probably would have been better to do this with a bunch of different documents to compare, but hey.

In all cases except one, I scanned without OCR so that I could run it standalone later. Here’s some info on the document that I used:

  • Pages: 2
  • Scan Quality: 300dpi, Color
  • Resulting File Size: 1.5 MB
  • Columns: 2, with some images

Maybe I am blind, but I couldn’t figure out a way to run ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap on Windows standalone. If you know how, please leave a message in the comments. In that test, I re-scanned with “Create Searchable PDF” checked in the ScanSnap Manager settings.

The Settings

I tried not to do too many fancy settings to keep things as “real-life” as possible. There were essentially three configurations:

ABBYY FineReader

I set Save Mode to “Text under page image” and Quality to High. These were the settings for the Mac ABBYY, and I believe it is what ScanSnap Manager on Windows uses as well.

Adobe Acrobat (Normal)

Abbyy

I set the output style to “Searchable Image (Exact)” because leaving it just as Searchable Image in my experience has caused some weird things to happen with the resulting PDF. I used these settings on both Windows and Mac.

Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abby Fine Reader Sprint 8.0

Adobe Acrobat (With ClearScan)

In Acrobat 9 there is a setting called ClearScan. I used that as an additional test to see what the difference is.

Speed

Windows

  • ABBYY Windows: 20.5 seconds
  • Acrobat 9: 13.9 seconds
  • Acrobat 9 With Clearscan: 17.6 seconds

Mac

  • ABBYY Mac: 44.7 seconds
  • Acrobat 8: 20.2 seconds

Winner: Acrobat!

Since they are different machines, you can’t directly compare the Windows and Mac times, but clearly in both cases Acrobat is faster.

File Size

The non-OCR’ed PDF was 1.5 MB.

Windows

  • ABBYY Windows: 1.7 MB (+.2 MB)
  • Acrobat 9: 1.5 MB (same)
  • Acrobat 9 With ClearScan: 315 KB (-1.16 MB)

Mac

  • ABBYY Mac: 1.4 MB (-.1 MB)
  • Acrobat 8: 1.5 MB (same)

Winner: Acrobat 9 with ClearScan!

With an astonishing 1.16 MB reduction in file size after OCR, Acrobat 9 with ClearScan is the winner. Wow.

Accuracy

Here is a passage from the article:

Let’s see how each of the packages did:

Mac

ABBYY Windows

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, mostsignificantly in itswidespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services withMississauga, Ont.-basedProphixSoftware, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 9 Windows

T he spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary su·ategic plans to financial statements. As with any farniliar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of tlle spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably tlle most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want witll tlle data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 9 With ClearScan

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary su·ategic plans to financial statements. As with any farniliar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of tlle spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably tlle most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want witll tlle data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

ABBYY Mac

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CiMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of die spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice-president, professional sendees with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 8 Mac

Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abbyy Finereader Sprint 8.0

T he spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything frorn preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. Aswith any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alterna tives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
T he appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest
way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate.
“Excel is probably the most comfortable
environment for a lot of financial professionals,” avaJlaun:.:,JIIU:::’l;)It;IIIULauuy1111l::>WIUC::>PU:C1U uocd::>
a de facto reporting tool. T he appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest
way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably me most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “T here’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organiza tions.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Winner: ABBYY FineReader for Mac looks the best to me. Acrobat 8 on the Mac is pretty terrible (in this example anyways).

Conclusion

Is there a “best” choice? It seems that in this example anyways, Adobe Acrobat 9 with ClearScan turned on gives fast results with good OCR while dramatically reducing the file size.

If you don’t really care about speed so much, FineReader produces good OCR results and for ScanSnap users, has the additional benefit of being integrated with ScanSnap Manager.

As with most things, the best software is the one that works the best for you. Have you found similar results? Any other tests of your own to share? Leave a note in the comments.

Abby Fine Reader Pro For Mac Vs Abbyy Finereader Sprint 8.0 Update List

(Photo by Polina Sergeeva)

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