ABBYY FotoReader is an excellent OCR program that “reads” any text embedded in an image file and converts it into the readable format of your choice (Word, Excel, PDF, RTF, TXT, PDF, or HTML). It can capture any photograph directly from your digital camera, and open almost any image file in your system. It can recognise text in many different languages, including double-byte characters.
The philosophy behind ABBYY FotoReader is really simple – instead of taking notes of every piece of text around you (signs, slides during a presentation, business cards, etc.), just take a picture of it and the program will convert that into readable and searchable text for you. You do not even need to save your photographs into your system, as this tool will connect to your digital camera and capture them for you.
The program will then try to identify and “read” the text automatically, classifying the different areas according to their appearance as text, images, or tables. However, you can also do that manually, and help the program identify more accurately what is what. This proves to be really useful in cases where the rich background or the bright colors of the image make it difficult to recognise some sections of the text. You can then tell FotoReader where it should be looking for text, or a table, or which areas should be ignored and stored as pure images. If the output format selected accepts all of these elements (such as Microsoft Word, RTF, or PDF), ABBYY FotoReader will create a document including both the text and the images, while rendering only the text for Excel and TXT output files.
This neat application includes basic image rotation capabilities to allow you to solve any paper orientation problems. As a bonus, FotoReader can be used as an image converter, allowing you to save your image files into various formats, such as BMP, JPG, PNG, or TIFF.
Comments