ABBYY Fine Reader: complex OCR

Librarians, archivists, and academic researchers use ABBYY Fine Reader to digitize and analyze archival collections. It is installed on the computers in the Digital Media and Collaboration Lab in Carpenter Library and available when this lab is open.

ABBYY Fine Reader’s advanced OCR Editor has features that make it possible to successfully OCR documents that more widely available tools* cannot:

Support for a wider range of languages (201) and documents written in multiple languages
Support older Gothic and Fraktur typefaces
Editable OCR dictionaries for documents containing technical or non-standard terminology
Manual page analysis for documents with complex layouts
Pattern training to “teach” the software to recognize unusual fonts or symbols (requires a large corpus of documents; for individual documents, human transcription is faster)

ABBYY Fine Reader also has a Compare Documents tool that can help researchers and archivists analyze the textual differences among multiple PDFs.

See also:

ABBYY Fine Reader user guide for detailed instructions

Note: Most documents written in English or other widely spoken languages can be successfully OCRed by more widely available campus tools:

Adobe Acrobat (installed on all college-owned computers, including library and lab computers, and available to install on personal devices).
Sensus Access Document Converter(available remotely to anyone with a brynmawr.edu email address).
Canon multi-function printers (automatically OCR scans saved as PDFs; see Printing and Scanning and Making accessible scans).

You only need to use ABBYY Fine Reader if these tools don’t support the language your document is written in or they fail to successfully OCR text due to issues that ABBYY Fine Reader was designed to address.

Questions?

If you have any additional questions or problems, don't hesitate to reach out to the Help Desk!

Phone: 610-526-7440 | Library and Help Desk hours
Email: help@brynmawr.edu | Service catalog
Location: Canaday Library 1st floor

ABBYY Fine Reader: complex OCR

Questions?

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