Q00P  After struggling for years with ReadIris Pro, because of limitations of software, extremely bad support and completely flawed installation procedure, we finally decided to try ABBY.

What a relief! The difference can't be explained. This software actually works! And converting previously scanned PDFs to searchable PDFs is a breeze.

If you are searching for OCR software we can only recommend you to buy it.  
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SPINUP  Best OCR recognition on the documents I've tried -- especially on poor quality scans, it blew the competition away (Acrobat 8 and VelOCRaptor 1.1.242). The tools to tweak the recognition after the first pass are very welcome.

One thing that would improve it is an option to crop the pages, but Preview took care of that.  
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XPLICIT  Why does the Mac edition cost twice the price as the Windows edition?  
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ICONZ113  is this working on snow leopard?  
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TOD WICKS  Devon Technologies has licensed the Abby OCR engine for use in DevonThink Pro Office 2.0 (which is in a prolonged but fairly bug-free beta). I have been a medium user of DTPO and Abby (that's how we shorten the name in the DT forums) has been a great OCR machine. I've scanned in some pretty shabby documents and magazine pages that were printed with no regard to ink flow or other non-qualitative aspects, and the difference between Abby and my previous workhorse (Omnipage) is immense.

Whether you use the DTPO version or you buy it outright, you can't go wrong if you want OCR accuracy.  
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ICONZ113  thank god for this, I think this is going to be the best in OCR on mac osx. Readiris 50 page restrictions are rediculous. Right I had a version come bundled in with my epson as well, finereader sprint plus 5, u cant compare those prebundled versions to this version. This one blows it out of the water  
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MRGLSMRC  a version of this package comes bundled with fujitsu scansnap printers. i have been using it for a while.

this newer product is for twain printers and digital cameras.--it can convert png files to pdf. i cannot therefore use it with my scanner and there is no upgrade path anyway.

when i bought my scanner 7 weeks ago i was promised a mail-in rebate upgrade to a full version of an additional scanning package from another company-- this hasn't happenned yet so i look forward to finding out the full capabilities of the fujitsu scanner.

but consideringing that abyy is selling a software now that is fairly comparable to my bundled software, you ought consider buying a bundled scanner instead of paying abyy the hundred dollars they want for this program.

there is nothing at the abyy site about version history or downloadable files so it is a bit hard to figure out.

what most impresses me about abyy is all the languages the ocr engine can handle and that these can be managed in preferences. I do wish i could use it for chess desktop publishing but that doesn't seem to be a choice. more's the pity because this is a russian product and if the russians wont support chess fonts in an ocr engine then who will? i don't think i will ever need to import pdfs into excel spreadsheets in languages like zapotec and turkmeni but these stupid options are available to me.  
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CURLYPAWS  I've long hoped that Abbyy would bring FineReader to Mac OS X, since OmniPage has fallen by the wayside and ReadIris has a number of irritations (a clunky upgrade procedure has always tried my patience and a limit of 50 page documents annoys, unless you spring for the even more expensive Corporate version).

While I was disappointed that it was FineReader Express rather than the full product, I've found the results to be excellent. You can't correct the output within the program, but you can amend its recognition of tables, graphics and text blocks. And, in fact, the output is very good indeed - needing a lot less correction than either OmniPage or ReadIris.

For the price, this is the best Mac OCR package available and, while it means that a full version of FineReader is probably less likely I'd still like to hope that we might one day see it - if only to offer an even greater degree of control over the output from within the program.  
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