ABBYY FineReader is an Optical Character Recognition software developed by ABBYY that converts images, PDFs and scanned documents into editable and searchable text. The output can be saved in various formats such as Word, Excel, PDF and HTML. The latest version of the software, called ABBYY Fine Reader 10, comes with several advanced features, including comprehensive language support and the ability to recognize text from photos taken with digital cameras and mobile phones. ABBYY also provides a basic version of the software, called FineReader Sprint, which can be used for basic OCR applications.

On April 20, 2010, ABBYY announced the availability of "ABBYY Finereader Engine 9.0 for Linux" which is a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows developers to build Linux-based applications utilizing ABBYY's document recognition, barcode recognition & PDF coversion technology.http://www.abbyy.com/Default.aspx?DN=bcfa7070-594f-475c-98e2-dba48097519c

ABBYY FineReader works by dividing each page into blocks of text, images, etc. Then, it isolates each character of the text and recognize them by comparing the images with a set of pattern images. To recognize text from images taken with digital cameras, it uses a technology called "Adaptive Recognition Technology" which is specifically designed for processing camera images.http://finereader.abbyy.com/about_OCR/whatis_ocr FineReader supports various input formats, including BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and PDF and various output formats, including DOC, XLS, PPT, TXT, RTF, PDF and HTML.

The other key featues of ABBYY FineReader include:

1. Recognizes digital camera images
2. Recognizes barcode
3. Supports 186 languages
4. Provides dictionary support for 39 languages
5. Can be integrated into Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat, etchttp://finereader.abbyy.com/

ABBYY FineReader 10 is the latest version of FineReader and it comes in three versions - Professional Edition, Corporate Edition and Site Licence Edition. The major improvements in FineReader 10 include,

1. Improved accuracy
2. Recognizes mobile phone camera images.
3. Compatible with Windows 7

"Nothing matches Finereader 10's ability to produce editable output from complex and hard-to-read pages, and no other OCR app matches its ability to detect automatically which parts of a document are text, tables, or images."-PCMag.comhttp://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355521,00.asp

"The program's ability to extract text from a wide range of sources is impressive, with even complicated page layouts causing few problems. And should a section of text that originally appears in a margin or in a box be accidentally incorporated into the main body, it can be easily separated."-TechRadar.comhttp://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/software/home-and-reference-software/abbyy-finereader-10-669755/review