We scanned in a Shopper page with multiple text paragraphs, subheaders and colour images and there were a few mistakes in the converted file, including the headline lacking spaces between words and some small graphics of tyre tracks, which we’d used as bullet points, appearing as HI, HI, H or 8. It can struggle a bit more with complex documents. There were no kerning mishaps (such as ‘cP being mistaken for ‘d’) either. Otherwise, it accurately replicated spacing, fonts, formatting (such as bold and underlined text), small tables and other symbols. In our tests, the biggest mistake it made was confusing a hyphen for a -»sign. Unsurprisingly, it works best with simple text pages, with which it performs almost flawlessly. You can compare different versions of the same document Nonetheless, FineReader 14 impressed us by how often it got everything right. The processes involved with OCR mean -like speech-to-text – it is probably not going to be 100% reliable in terms of accuracy for a while. You can also scan directly to Word, but it’s safer to check it over in the OCR editor before saving the results as a. We simply had to place the document in our scanner, connect it to the PC, click Scan in the main menu and Scan to OCR Editor. It’s very handy for getting the best results when converting, say, a PDF into a Word document, but the main reason for buying OCR software is to digitise paper documents, and FineReader 14 makes this child’s play. It produces a lot of false positives, but in a way that’s the preferable outcome – it’s better for the software to be overly cautious than for it to miss errors. This highlights possible mistakes (where a character hasn’t been correctly copied across) and takes you through them one at a time, so you can quickly fix them with the basic text-editing tools. In fact, FineReader 14 does much of the work for you, with its spellchecker-like Verify tool.

It takes about five seconds to digitize a two-page, mixed text and color PDF, and as in FineReader 12, you can start checking and editing the first few pages of a long document before the rest has finished processing. We reviewed, SMB-targeting Corporate edition, which also adds a document comparison tool and automated processing – though happily, the core paper-to-digital conversion features appear to be identical across both versions.įineReader 14 doesn’t feel noticeably faster than its predecessor at converting documents into editable form, but it works quickly. FineReader 14 (we don’t know what happened to number 13 either – maybe it’s superstitious) promises improved performance and a new suite of PDF editing tools, albeit at a steep starting.

Ten best ocr software review