ABBYY...is anybody using it?

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johnelle
Posts: 32
Joined: 05 Oct 2014, 08:47
E-book readers owned: kindle
Number of books owned: 800
Country: United States

ABBYY...is anybody using it?

Post by johnelle »

I see some references to ABBYY Finereader so I decided to check it out because I was not fully satisfied with the ScanTailor output. I downloaded the trial and when I install it on one of my Windows 7 computers it crashes early in the install (twice). On the other Windows 7 machine it gets a protection error at the end of the install on some license file and uninstalls itself. For a ~$180 piece of software seems a bit unreliable.

Is anybody using this on Windooz?

Is it a fairly smooth process to get from SpreadPi to output?
Vidar
Posts: 12
Joined: 17 Sep 2012, 17:18
E-book readers owned: Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Oasis
Number of books owned: 400
Country: Norway

Re: ABBYY...is anybody using it?

Post by Vidar »

Well, I upgraded to ver 12 from ver 7 some time ago and agree it is a bit unstable. It was fine but a bit slow on an older Vista machine. But on my current 8.1 machine I have had a couple of issues. At one point the program couldn't find the "language file" so I couldn't do anything and had to reinstall the whole program. I also had the program suddently close on me while editing. Fortunately Abby automatically saves everything you edit and you get promtet to "recover untitlet batch" if you have not already saved it to somewhere, when you reopen the program. The initial install went fine, but I remember that I could'n use the install file from the old computer, but had to download a new one. Is the trial and the "real program" two different files. Sorry, but I can't remember. But the trial is very limited to how many pages it will process. I guess ver 12 is an improvement on ver 7, but not really much in the core OCR processing. It's more to to with general post-processing and quality av saving and some keyboard shortcuts. Sorry, can't help you if you cannot install at all, but obviously ver 12 is a more bloated and buggy program. I'm Windows only BTW.
cday
Posts: 451
Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
Number of books owned: 0
Country: UK

Re: ABBYY...is anybody using it?

Post by cday »

I installed FineReader Pro 10 a while back without any issues, and recently installed the upgrade to FineReader Pro 12 on my Windows 7 computer again without any problem, so I wonder if the problems you encountered might be related to the installation of the trial version and Abbyy's need to ensure that it couldn't be misused.

Generally it's an excellent program: OCR as good as it gets in the present state of the art and a clear interface, although the extra features added recently have slightly complicated the interface. I haven't used '12 a great deal and may have seen one crash but it has generally operated as expected. But OCR is a very demanding application technically and an hasn't attained perfection yet...
stromateis
Posts: 8
Joined: 29 Oct 2014, 00:18
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Country: USA

Re: ABBYY...is anybody using it?

Post by stromateis »

I am using FineReader 12 and I find it an excellent product and probably the best on the market for performing an OCR on captured images of books. FineReader suffers from the same problems that all of this family of "trial" software have. The DRM is just unwieldy and causes problems and FineReader isn't the only program of this class to suffer.

As far as SpreadPi output it really depends. I found that I needed to crop and size the images from SpreadPi and do a few tweaks (mostly cleanup and sharpening) through Photoshop to get the best OCR. Of course that really depends on the book and camera being used. I found SpreadPi the wrong instrument for this type of operation. I just need to capture an image, drop it into a monitored folder and have Photoshop run a batch job on the images, and then import into FineReader. SpreadPi is great but I needed the ability to sort my images from Odd and Even pages because the orientation is different and hence need slightly different batch jobs, and I found SpreadPi overly complicated in the coding area to just modify for what I needed (it was also a bit unstable for me) so I coded up a more simplistic PHP webpage to get the job done in the way I needed.
kamina
Posts: 13
Joined: 20 Jul 2014, 10:24
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Spain

Re: ABBYY...is anybody using it?

Post by kamina »

Hi johnelle

I'm using FineReader 12 for some weeks and I have to say that's a incredible software. I process all the images (color, saturation, cropping, page strighten...) with it and, for text photos, it's amazing even using the "auto" processing. The OCR it's just incredible. I found that it have some problems with capital letters and tildes, but anyway it uses to mark them as a "doubt" character and let you decide. Also, the graphical interface to review the text and OCR mistakes it's really good, with very handy shortcuts that makes the job very comfortable.

About the problem you're having, I've tried the software in three machines with Windows 7 (64-bits) and never had a problem. Have you tried to re-download it? What's the problem the installer throw?
As you say, it's a expensive software. If you want to try the full version you can get some "shared one" over there to try if it runs ok and then buy it or not.

Please, feel free to ask anything you want to know or if you need some more help.
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