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REVIEW
Russian import has knack for scanning complex documents
The American economy is grounded on the principle that competition is good. Certainly, consumers will cheer the introduction of ABBYY Software House's FineReader Pro 5.0 desktop optical character recognition package to U.S. markets.
This Russian import (the company's American division is ABBYY USA) does certain things - particularly recognition and layout reproduction of complex pages - better than the market-leading OmniPage Pro ii from ScanSoft Inc., and we can expect this competition in the desktop OCR market to spur both products to new heights.
Although FineReader and OmniPage both do a virtually flawless job of recognizing standard typed pages in good condition, we also test OCR products with complex pages, including color graphic elements, tables, labels and vertical text. In addition, we test OCR programs with degraded documents, such as faxes that have been crumpled.
We found that FineReader did a somewhat better job than OmniPage of retaining formatting of the complex documents we used in testing. Neither program passed the test without numerous...