Video Overview
Welcome to the Accessibility Guy channel! We’re excited to share that ABBYY FineReader 16 is now on our computer. This latest version of ABBYY FineReader provides a stronger OCR engine and a host of PDF editing tools that can make document processing easier and more efficient. In this video, we’ll provide an overview of some of the most common workflows we personally work through when using ABBYY FineReader, so let’s jump right in.
Launching ABBYY FineReader PDF presents two main distinctions: the PDF document side and the OCR editor. While you can use the tool as a PDF editor, we want to focus on the OCR editor, as ABBYY FineReader has one of the strongest OCR engines on the market. It can assist you in converting file types, from PDF to Word, for example, or editing underlying text of a document and updating language settings.
When you launch the OCR editor, it will prompt you to open a file. Once you’ve selected your file, ABBYY FineReader will perform OCR on all the pages, and you’ll see a thumbnail section on the far left side of the screen that displays a snapshot of all the different pages in your document. The image panel displays the visual aspect of your PDF, and typically matches directly with the file. On the far right side of the screen, you’ll find the text area of ABBYY FineReader, where you can edit any of the underlying text of the program. If the OCR is poor, or you need to update a spelling mistake or add in information for acronyms, you can make changes in the text panel. Finally, a zoom panel appears on the bottom of the screen and will update depending on where you are in the image panel.
Before we dive into the settings, we like to adjust our settings. For example, we’ll take this document into a searchable PDF, so we need to adjust our PDF settings. To do that, we’ll select the Tools button and then select Options. This brings up the options window where you can set a variety of settings. In the General tab, you can choose when the OCR editor begins, or you can set up a scanning device to scan documents directly into ABBYY FineReader. We really want to spend most of our time under format settings.
Earlier, we mentioned that we’re going to be exporting to PDF, so we need to select our document type. We can adjust the settings for documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, text files, HTML ePubs, etc. For PDF, we’ll dive into the preferred settings. When creating accessible files, the first thing we want to adjust is the image quality. If you have a lot of images in your document, be sure to set custom. We’ll change our color control from automatic to “do not change image color,” as we don’t want any quality loss on our file. Then we’ll change the dropdown menu for quality to “quality loss not allowed” and select OK. We have additional settings that may not be relevant for you, such as creating PDF view a documents, which requires OCR. Additionally, we have the checkbox selected to use MRC compression, which also requires OCR. We like to apply the ABBYY precise scan to smooth characters on page images, which makes the font and images a bit crisper and easier to work with under searchable PDF settings.
We like to have the text under the page image, but you can adjust the settings for better results depending on the document you’re working with. We’ll have the option selected to create bookmarks from headings, create PDF tags, and ensure that our fonts are embedded. Additionally, you can set metadata in this way.
In conclusion, ABBYY FineReader 16 offers a range of OCR and PDF editing tools
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