Need advice on using Abbyy for actual scanning

Share your software workflow. Write up your tips and tricks on how to scan, digitize, OCR, and bind ebooks.

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whitepage
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Joined: 11 Mar 2015, 18:12
E-book readers owned: Onyx Note Pro, KDX
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Country: New Zealand

Need advice on using Abbyy for actual scanning

Post by whitepage »

On a number threads it seems that some people are using Abbyy to process images, either on its own or in conjunction with ScanTailor.
This made me curious to try the software.

At this stage I don't have a DIY scanner (using a standalone Canon). I see that Abbyy can replace the scrappy Canon software.
But the program seems to have a million options and I am not sure what would be the best way to scan a document to images, either before going to ScanTailor, or even without ST.
It seems to me that the most relevant menu choice might be "Scan and Save as Image".
Would anyone be able to share some tips about what settings to select to scan and save images so they can be used as-is (meaning they are already deskewed etc), or processed with ST?

One item I am wondering about is the choice of scanning interface offered by Abbyy: you can choose the Abbyy interface or the native Canon interface (ScanGear). Both do some pre-processing, and in fact if you choose the native one, the Canon pre-processing is chained with the Abbyy pre-processing if automatic pre-processing is selected. It's hard to know what is optimal!

In advance, many thanks. :)
Abbyy options
Abbyy options
Abbyy-options.png (14.1 KiB) Viewed 11879 times
ScanGear options (native Canon interface)
ScanGear options (native Canon interface)
Scangear.png (43.52 KiB) Viewed 11879 times
bubble.ou
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Re: Need advice on using Abbyy for actual scanning

Post by bubble.ou »

the scanner's native UI is better than Abbyy's UI.

Abbyy's scan UI is for general purpose. It communicates with different scanners via drivers. Since Abbyy's UI is targeted at all scanners, some properties in its UI might not be supported by a specific scanner, while some features of a specific scanner might be missing from Abbyy's UI.
L.Willms
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Re: Need advice on using Abbyy for actual scanning

Post by L.Willms »

bubble.ou wrote: 29 Mar 2017, 05:53 the scanner's native UI is better than Abbyy's UI.
I don't know about the Canon user interface, but I also do not use the ABBYY interface to my Epson scanner, but the Epson supplied interface.

As to general advice for using ABBYY FineReader, you should know that this software works in four stages:

1st: image acquisition
either by opening image files or by direct interfacing of a scanner

2nd: basic image improvement, which involves
- splitting facing pages and turning pages
- increasing contrast by various measures
You can do a lot of this manually using ABBYY's image editor

3rd: image analyis, i.e. guessing what is text or table and what is picture, and marking those areas
You can do this manually by marking those areas yourself, and you can use -- thank you user "bubble.ou" for showing this to me -- area templates, which you can then apply to all pages or all pages being marked or to just the current page.
Text areas can be further specified as being main text, header, footer (and I believe also foot note, and possibly more).
Also the inner structure of tables can be analyzed and edited
One area type is the background picture, which can be overlayed by other area types.

4th the actual text recognition.


Beware that the results of later steps are being lost when you change the results of earlier steps -- but the OCR result is not changed by simply moving the borders of a given area around. But when you use the image editor, the results of image analysis (3rd phase) and OCR (4th phase) are being lost.

You can save the current state to disk by saving the ABBY Fine Reader document - unfortunately this is realized as a "save as" process, i.e. ABBYY FineReader does not memorize the folder where one saves the FineReader document.
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