ABBYY FineReader Professional is able to turn various types of documents, such as faxes, barcodes, photographs, legal, magazine or newspaper pages into content that can be easily searched and edited. The process that leads to this involves a technology that carefully analyzes the original file and then reconstructs it, preserving the layout and style of the source document.

The application works and looks in a professional way. The classic, yet organized GUI provides menus that include all of its functions, but buttons are also available. When you launch the application, you will be prompted by the New Task window, which includes several options.

In the first tab you can scan a file or convert it file (PDF or image) to OpenOffice Writer, scan and save and image, or scan a file to a searchable PDF. If you choose the Writer tab, you can scan or convert a PDF or image to OpenOffice Writer, while the Adobe PDF tab lets you scan a file or convert an image to PDF.

Furthermore, the E-book tab allows you to scan a file (PDF or image) to a format supported by E-book readers (EPUB, FB2, or HTML). In the last tab you can scan or convert a file (PDF or image) to other known formats, such as XLS, RTF, TXT, PPTX, or CSV. A graphic editor is also integrated into this application, so that you can modify any details of an image.

As far as the conversion speed goes, this application is amazing. CPU and memory resources are heavily used, to be truthful, but this is the price you pay for high quality output results.

All in all, we were impressed by ABBYY’s FineReader capabilities. As the industry standard for the OCR market, it does not disappoint.

Here are some key features of "ABBYY FineReader Professional":
Outstanding OCR Accuracy and Format Retention:
- ABBYY FineReader lets you accurately turn paper documents and images into fully-formatted electronic files for easy editing, adapting, archiving and sharing. The application delivers superior recognition accuracy and format retention even on documents and images which are typically difficult for OCR — such as faxes, digital photographs, legal documents, documents with long tables, barcodes, multiple and complex image items (e.g. magazine pages) and many more. It allows you to digitize your papers and dramatically optimize document processing with literally no retyping and reformatting.

Intelligent Reconstruction of Complex Document Structure and Formatting:
- ABBYY’s unique Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ADRT) analyzes the entire multipage document and precisely reconstructs it with original layout, style and formatting attributes across all pages. By intelligently “seeing” the document in its entirety, the program identifies various elements of document structure and reconstructs them as native Microsoft Office formatting elements. Based on the 2nd generation of ADRT technology, ABBYY FineReader 10 intelligently re-creates the most complex formatting attributes, such as
- ABBYY ADRT reconstructs Table Of Contents
- Headers and footers
- Page numbering
- Captions to images / tables / diagrams
- Fonts and styles
- Footnotes
- Table of contents (with formatting and linking)
- Heading hierarchic structure
- ABBYY FineReader also accurately re-creates in the output file a range of additional formatting elements including line numbering, signatures and stamps that can be found in legal and other documents.

Recognition of Digital Camera and Mobile Phone Camera Images:
- FineReader was the first document conversion application that has introduced digital camera OCR capabilities. With its already 3rd generation of ABBYY Camera OCR technology, FineReader recognizes photos of documents captured with digital camera and mobile phones. It intelligently identifies photographed documents and applies its recognition technology for camera images to ensure the best OCR results. ABBYY FineReader gives you wider possibilities to capture documents and turn them into useful electronic files even when the usual scanning can’t be applied — for example, when you are on the go. The program automatically adjusts digital photos before recognition and provides a wide range of image pre-processing functions and tools
- Automatic correction of 3D perspective distortions
- ISO noise correction
- Blurred image correction
- Trapezium crop tool
- Automated Resolution Detection and Correction
- Document orientation detection
- Image deskewing
- Image despeckling
- Line straightening
- Image inverting and rotating tools
- Dual page splitting tool

Comprehensive Language Support:
- ABBYY FineReader is the only OCR solution which “reads” text in as much as 186 languages including a variety of Latin and Cyrillic languages, Greek, Armenian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Hebrew, and Korean. The latest version of FineReader includes dictionaries with spell-check capabilities for 39 languages and supports the integration with Microsoft Word custom dictionary to accurately recognize user specific terms. FineReader simplifies the OCR process by converting documents with automatic identification of appropriate language(s) and allows you to work with multilingual documents with any language combination.

Intelligent Interface with One-Click Conversion Tasks:
- The ABBYY FineReader’s interface comes with pre-programmed “Quick Tasks” which include all the key OCR and document conversion tasks grouped into intuitive menu functions, according to the output format. Quick Tasks allow you to quickly select the required task and get the converted file with just a mouse click. The automated Quick Tasks dramatically reduce amount of steps typically required to process a document and helps to increase productivity. With ABBYY FineReader 10, you can also define your own frequently used tasks using the Automation Manager.

Complete Integration with Popular Office Applications:
- When converting documents, ABBYY FineReader 10 exports the results directly to your favorite applications including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat / Reader. In addition, recognized text can be saved in a variety of file formats, including PDF, PDF/A, HTML, Microsoft Word XML, DOC/DOCX, RTF, XLS/ XLSX, PPTX, CSV and TXT.
- You can also launch ABBYY FineReader from within Microsoft Office applications, scan a paper document or open document image, convert image to text and put the recognized text into the document you are currently working on without leaving the application.

PDF Conversion, Archiving and Securing:
- ABBYY FineReader is a professional and versatile tool for working with PDF files. Its key PDF conversion functions and features include
- Saving to Searchable PDF – FineReader keeps the text information as a separate layer from the image (text under image), making it available for search and retrieval.
- Saving to PDF/A for long-term archiving.
- Saving to PDF with MRC compression Enhanced – The application allows you to decrease the size of an output PDF file up to 10 times compared to the original, while the visual quality of the image stays intact. This option is ideal for PDF archiving and sharing.
- PDF for Web Publishing and Tagged PDF – All PDF files created in FineReader are optimized for publishing on the Web. In addition, with ABBYY FineReader you can create tagged PDF files optimized for handheld devices and screen-reader devices.
- Password-Protected PDF and Encryption Support – You can set document Open and Permissions passwords and restrict printing, contents extraction, editing, adding comments or adding/removing pages .ABBYY FineReader also complies with the latest encryption standards.

Barcode Recognition:
- ABBYY FineReader reads both 1-D and 2-D barcodes. It recognizes a barcode and displays its value.

High Speed Multicore Processing:
- With its intelligent and powerful conversion algorithms, FineReader leverages the full potential of multicore processors to recognize multipage documents with maximum efficiency. The processing is divided and executed in parallel and helps to streamline business workflow and increase processing speed. This feature is especially useful for high-volume document conversion.

Useful Bonus Application – ABBYY Screenshot Reader:
- ABBYY Screenshot Reader is an easy-to-use application, which allows you to capture areas of the screen (make screenshots) and recognize text and tables on them. It is ideal for pulling text, tables, or images from Web browser pages, flash presentations, Windows Explorer file menus, or error messages. Screenshot Reader is also an ideal “quick OCR” tool when you want to pull small quotes or a few sentences of text from a PDF or image file