{"id":50368,"date":"2023-11-29T20:21:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T04:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=50368"},"modified":"2023-11-29T20:21:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-30T04:21:43","slug":"abbyy-finereader-amazement-and-disappointment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2023\/11\/29\/abbyy-finereader-amazement-and-disappointment\/","title":{"rendered":"ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:1094,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/pdf.abbyy.com&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260228153917\\\/https:\\\/\\\/pdf.abbyy.com\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-02 02:16:42&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-24 19:42:43&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-05 13:18:26&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-15 09:05:34&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-20 10:48:04&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:503},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-26 11:14:03&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-02 17:17:15&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-08 08:51:46&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-13 08:26:24&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-20 20:12:40&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-20 20:12:40&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:417,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/history.norwescon.org&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260207190938\\\/https:\\\/\\\/history.norwescon.org\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-01 04:49:00&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-20 10:28:28&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-24 14:45:39&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-27 18:09:24&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-31 10:06:53&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-05 04:10:07&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-08 09:51:41&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-13 00:51:37&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-18 04:51:21&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-24 06:43:25&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-28 02:59:24&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-02 22:43:29&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-08 08:30:31&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-13 08:26:16&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:503},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-20 12:12:31&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:503}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-05-20 12:12:31&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:503},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:1095,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.pcmag.com\\\/reviews\\\/abbyy-finereader-pro-for-mac&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.pcmag.com\\\/reviews\\\/abbyy-finereader&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>I\u2019ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in <a href=\"https:\/\/pdf.abbyy.com\/\">ABBYY FineReader<\/a> on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been <em>really<\/em> impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I\u2019m looking forward to giving it a lot of use &#8211; oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF\/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.<\/p>\n<p>Since I\u2019m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the <a href=\"https:\/\/history.norwescon.org\/\">Norwescon historical archives<\/a> project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m glad I tried the trial before buying.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less \u2014 most notably, it\u2019s missing the part of the Windows version that I\u2019ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.<\/p>\n<p>On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR\u2019d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to <em>really<\/em> fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat\u2019s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)<\/p>\n<p>On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there\u2019s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY\u2019s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it\u2019s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I\u2019m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.<\/p>\n<p>And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/reviews\/abbyy-finereader-pro-for-mac\">a review of the software by PC Magazine<\/a>\u2026nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it\u2019s been 10 years and this major feature still isn\u2019t there? My guess \u2014 though I\u2019d <em>love<\/em> to be proven wrong \u2014 is that it\u2019s simply not going to happen.<\/p>\n<p>Pity, that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ABBYY FineReader PDF is a really impressive tool for converting scanned image-only PDFs into searchable, accessible PDFs. Unless you\u2019re on a Mac, where one of the most powerful parts of the program is missing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2039,2034,2038],"tags":[5711,5822,5821,4179,1548,5823],"class_list":["post-50368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-geekery","category-tech","tag-a11y","tag-abbyy","tag-abbyy-finereader-pdf","tag-accessibility","tag-macos","tag-pdf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}