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4.5 stars
"Changed My Life"
Summary: ABBYY FineReader Professional 6.0 exemplifies the fantastic execution of a great idea. I rarely post reviews, but am so impressed with this program that I feel obliged to sing its praises. I have tried to explain why I love it. I am a student, so I use it primarily to copy my books and articles onto my computer. Overall, the program runs extremely smoothly and boasts all of the features you would hope for: great quality recognition, spell check, and the option to save files in any number of formats. I generally save files as PDFs and read/mark them up in Acrobat. (This works well for a student because I can write limitless marginalia, search the text for key passages, and underline, highlight, and circle without marking my actual books.) One of ABBYY's nicest features is the option to 'Split Dual Pages', which was specifically designed for books. This allows you to display only the page you are reading and stop your highlighting in Acrobat from continuing across pages. I prefer to save the text with images in front of uncertain characters. I have no problem reading or underlining those words with text and pictures mixed. A three hundred page book is generally not bigger than seven or eight megabytes. Problems with retaining formatting, tables, and indentation are rare, but you do have the option to save the text of a file behind the page image (also in PDF format). This means you can look at an actual photograph of the page - thus guaranteeing the accuracy of the layout - while still underlining, highlighting, and searching the text. The files are a bit bigger and move a bit slower in Acrobat the same book would be about 55 megabytes but they are still very manageable. I prefer the former format but did use the latter initially. I have been using ABBYY since the start of the academic year, and it has changed my life. I never have a problem finding that passage I remember reading but didnt jot down. I save myself hours of retyping quotes into my notes. I previously used sticky notes to mark important passages or the architecture of a book, but now I can do that all with (searchable!!) bookmarks and comments in Acrobat. Perhaps most importantly, this makes my library portable. This has proven particularly useful for a publication I am drafting. For the first time, I have been able to take all of my secondary sources into the archives. When I want to know the specific pieces of evidence another scholar has cited, I simply open the material on my computer. If I find a interesting document and want to see if others have commented on it, I can open the material and search it for the citation. None of this would be possible if I didnt have ABBYY to scan my sources, reliably recognize the text, and save it in the very convenient PDF format. Scanning time is much less than I would have expected. Using an inexpensive Lexmark X83 flatbed scanner, I can scan and recognize just over one page (two pages of a book) per minute. ABBYY can receive the images from the scanner and have them recognized in the time it takes for Adobe just to load the image. If I had a document feeder, I expect I could drop a stack of papers in and let them work in the background. Reading material on a computer is probably easier than reading it in a book. I can type comments faster and more legibly than I can scribble them while holding a book open. The text is larger, which makes it easier on my eyes, and I get fewer stiff necks from being hunched over. I have been using ABBYY for about seven months, and I am still discovering great new features. I have listed some of the most recent and pleasantly surprising options: - Scanned images are saved as TIFF files in special folders ABBYY calls batches; using WinZip, it is possible to reduce these batches to ONE TENTH of their original size. - ABBYY displays the recognition percentage for each page allowing you to only spell check those pages with higher error percentages (a high error percentage for ABBYY is 6-7%) - It is possible to run a Background Recognition, so you can continue scanning and editing pages non-stop. This is very convenient. - ABBYY boasts a host of recognition languages including Latin. It also allows you to create a user-defined language group consisting of several languages. (For example, I have created one to recognize English, Latin, and Greek to increase the accuracy for my history books.) Using this feature can take a page mixed with several languages and decrease the error percentage from 5% to 3 or 4%. I love this program and expect it would be useful to many people with diverse needs. There is very little I would change to improve it.
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