ABBYY FineReader: Best-In-Class OCR

ABBYY FineReader

Starts at $119.99

- Edward Mendelson

For years now, our undisputed Editor’s Choice for the best-in-class optical character reading software has been FineReader. The revamped latest version, ABBYY FineReader 14, is a topnotch OCR app that adds document comparison features that you can’t find anywhere else and new PDF-editing features that rival the advanced feature set in Adobe Acrobat DC. FineReader 14 is also the best document-comparison productivity app I’ve ever seen, with the ability to compare documents in two different formats, so you can compare a Word file to a PDF version of the same file and see which of the two has the latest revisions. It’s truly terrific.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

In my writing and editing work, I’ve relied on ABBYY FineReader for as long as I can remember; one reason I work mostly in Windows and not on a Mac is that ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac is a lot less powerful than FineReader 14 for Windows. For this review, I tested the FineReader 14 Corporate edition. The Standard version has all the OCR and PDF-editing features of Corporate but lacks the document-compare component and doesn’t include the Hot Folder feature that automatically creates PDF files from documents or images saved to the folder.

For most users, the Standard version will be more than enough, but the document-comparison feature alone may be worth the extra price for the Corporate app. The prices, by the way, are perpetual, with no annoying subscription model like Adobe’s.

You’ll typically use an OCR app to convert scanned images of printed text into either an editable Word document or a searchable PDF file. Now that every smartphone takes high-resolution photos, you don’t even need a scanner to create images that you can turn into editable documents or PDFs. However, your OCR software has to be able to work with skewed and otherwise irregular photos in addition to high-quality scans.