FineReader OCR Pro App Reviews

Good recognition. There were some install problem with getting an automator to work, but those have seemed to miracuously recover. The program is very slow on startup, but once its running the results are great.

Wish it worked a bit better. Can do the job, but takes longer than PDFPen to OCR, and worst of all, it inflates the size of the PDFs enormously. I used it to split an already OCR’d PDF that was 8MB from two-page scans to single-page scans, and the size went to over 300MB.

Ive used this app to OCR several documents, including a book that I scanned and converted to epub. I think the interface is very reasonable. It takes a long time to do a big job, but thats unavoidable. I suppose Id like to see more work on things like dealing with hyphens across page boundaries and so on, and generally with connecting up blocks of text in a sequence that takes into account sentence-level puncuation in general. Ive used it in both English and French, and it seems to work well in both. The other thing Id like to see is some kind of flag or marker when a very unusual word or unusual sequence has been recognized (including punctuation), so that they can be dealt with systematically. All in all, good job.

After trying a large number of OCR for OS X this is the best of the lot. I scan a lot of old documents that are faded and barely legible in several languages and this app come through every time. No OCR on the planet will do everything perfectly but this one produced the best results by far especially with foreign languages.

I use this app every day for work to OCR documents in foreign languages so that the documents can be translated using a CAT tool, and I am so thankful there is a great OS X-compatible app for this purpose so I don’t have to use Windows. The multilingual functionality is of critical importance for my work, and text recognition works comparatively well in all the languages I have tried it in. Quality of text recognition is very dependent on the clarity and resolution of the original PDF, of course. Even as I rely on this app, documents still need formatting clean-up afterward; that is true of any and all OCR applications out there (I’ve tried many), and this one compares favorably. I use it every day, and for my purposes it meets all my needs and saves me a ton of work. Here is my wish list for a future update: The app could use a few UI tweaks, including customizable keyboard shortcuts, changes to reduce mousing, continuous scrolling, etc. I also wish output were not in Word 2007 DOCX format but in the latest 2010 and 2013 DOCX formats (which have certain advantages in a translation environment). Other changes I would make: 1. Table structures should always be with a *minimum* row height, not an absolute row height (which can mask text that doesn’t fit). 2. Text boxes and frames should always have a minimum height as well (also to prevent masking text below the bottom border). 3. Images should be inline. 4. A version of Exact Copy output should be possible that strictly uses tables and not frames. 5. iCloud Drive or OneDrive integration. 6. Training technology, which exists in the Windows version but is missing in the Mac version. 7. More sophisticated formatting awareness to minimize tags (in the underlying OOXML). 8. OOXML tag cleaner (it gets carried away with bookmarks too, sometimes).

I bought this app in hopes of automating the conversion of my scanned documents to searchable PDFs. Using an automator script, I was able to have it monitor a Scans folder and then perform OCR in place on the pdf files. Unfortunately, after the third file I noticed some very bad issues with their image preprocessing. My PDF files were getting cut off (loss of information due to unexpected change in page size), and placed into incorrect orientation. This happened on 2 of the 3 files I tested. In fact, if you run the PDF through twice, ABBYY happily rotates and chops the images AGAIN, making the detection even worse. I tried turning off the image preprocessing, but without it, ABBYY doesn’t seem to even perform OCR. Really disappointed to have spent so much and got such a buggy product.

I bought this thinking it would speed up my OCR processing and make it more accurate, but it didn’t take long for me to realize the program I was already using (OCRKit) is much, much better overall. Fine Reader doesn’t deal well with large pdfs — usually they cause it to crash at one stage or another. And often the app crashes before it even opens up. Today I had to Force Quit it because it froze up while reading a pdf of 800+ pages. When I try to open the program back up, it asks me whether I want to recover the file I was using. I say yes, but then nothing happens: the program doesn’t open, the document isn’t restored, nada. ABBYY ought to test this software thoroughly, and say what it will actually do without crashing so that people don’t waste their money. No one should assume that all users are usng OCR for documents of just a few pages. I wish I could have my money returned.

I use both PCs and Macs at work. Love Omnipage on the PC side, but struggle with Fine Reader on the Mac side. Surely a better apple based product can be produced. Until then we are stuck with this product.

This is an update to my 2014 Review. My hat is off to the ABBYY Marketing and Product Development because they did add AppleScript hooks to the product, which means their first-class OCR engine and conversion utility are more ameniable to inclusion in workflows! That has moved my rating from a ‘1’ to a ‘5 2014 Review Follows =============== There is no question the OCR engine and conversion utilitiy are top notch. But this product is purposefully hobbled by the utter lack of AppleScript or Automator hooks to be useful in automated workflow where the addition of a scanned document to a MacOSX Folder can trigger FineReader OCR Pro run a conversion. Instead, ALL document OCR scans from pre-existing sources require either a drag and drop on FIneReader OCR Pro, or you have to use “File->Open” dialogs. Bottom line : FineReader OCR Pro is a first class OCR engine and yet, worst of class for workflow inclusion due to ABBYY marketing & product management decisions to purposefully hobble this product’s support for AppleScript and Automator.

This is not like other “Pro” apps. And it doesn’t do much of what it claims to do. What it does do, it does poorly compared to other “Pro” apps. APPEARANCE: The UI looks alright — e.g., better than other “Pro” apps like Acrobat Pro. That’s about the kindest thing I can say about this. UNUSABLY SLOW: The app takes 5+ minutes to open a 20 page PDF. The same document opens in less than 3 seconds in Acrobat Pro. When selecting a new page of a PDF, there is a 5-15 second delay before the page shows un in the editing pane. There is no delay in other apps like Acrobat Pro. TOOLS DON’T WOKk: The object selection tool cannot select (or edit or remove) MOST (any?) objects (e.g., text, images, etc. — even when you save the PDF in a way that preserves layer info). Acrobat Pro does this quickly and without hiccup. INNEFFICIENT: Even the simplest tasks (e.g., opening a 20 page PDF) causes my Mac’s fan speed to run at top speed and drastically reduce my battery life (e.g., roughly half of otherwise expected battery life). I never have this problem in Acrobat Pro — unless I am OCRing a huge 500+ PDF scan or something intense like that. FRUSTRATING: Files are automatically altered. upon opening E.g., when opening a 10 page PDF slide presentation, slides that were half image and half text were turned into separate pages — one page with the image and another page with the text. Further, some images in the original just didn’t show up when opened in Finereader (usually when the images overlapped with text). Other well-known apps like Acrobat Pro never do this. Much of these issues seem to conflict with the claims in this app’s descrption. I am very dissappointed that I paid for this — even the discounted rate was way too much for what this app does. I hope I can be refunded.

I just spent $90 on this piece of junk and it will not even start! I get an error that says: Fine Objects Internal Program Error Assertion Failed:() ../src/ResourceINfo.cpp, 507 Please help! Very disappointing! UPDATE ======== After multiple attempts to contact Abbyy support I was provided with a file to load which did not nox the crash at startup. After more attempts to email the support team I was told that they do not know what the problem is and I should call their support line. They are only open M-F durrening business hours. I have made one call but sat on hold for an extended period of time and gave up. Sadly I need to support my family and cannot take weekdays off to help Abbyy get their broke software to work. I have paid my $90 at this point and have nothing for it. Apple, please take this software out of the store until they can get this product to work.