New Mac OCR software enters final public testing

ABBYY is in the final stretch of public testing for its forthcoming optical character recognition (OCR) software for the Macintosh, FineReader 5 Pro for Mac. ABBYY claims that FineReader 5 Pro provides the highest level of word recognition accuracy and format retention of any solution now available. If you want, you can give the software a try now, in the form of a downloadable public beta.

ABBYY USA president and CEO Dean Tang said that his company has offered the beta version to the Mac community in order to get feedback.

“Our software gives Mac users the most powerful OCR technology — better than anything they’ve seen before. For ABBYY, this represents a strong entry into the Mac market,” said Tang.

The software was co-developed by Sound & Vision Inc. and incorporates ABBYY’s own OCR engine, which it says delivers results with two to three times fewer mistakes than competing products. ABBYY claims that the software works even when converting complex pages and poor quality documents, such as those produced by dot matrix printers, photocopiers and fax machines.

ABBYY said that the FineReader 5 Pro for Mac has been “designed from the ground up” as a Mac application. The OCR software makes use of Mac technologies like QuickTime, AppleScript, Drag & Drop, Navigation Manager, Appearance Manager and Text-to-Speech.

The public beta version (listed on the site as a final candidate) is available for download. System requirements call for a PowerPC-based Mac; Mac OS 8.6 or higher (works on Mac OS X in Classic mode); 128MB RAM; QuickTime 4.0 or higher; CarbonLib 1.3.1 or higher on pre-X machines.

Once it’s released, the software will be priced at US$129 for a competitive upgrade from any OCR software, including versions bundled with scanners. The final version is expected to be released on September 10.