ABBYY has launched FineReader Pro for Mac, a professional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application for efficient document scanning and conversion on the Mac platform. 

The new application allows Mac users to easily edit, share, archive and search through their documents by turning them into popular electronic file formats, as well as copy and quote text from scans, PDFs and digital photos. 

“Professional grade OCR solutions have not previously been available for the Mac platform, leaving many users to have to deal with scaled down feature sets and miss out on much of the potential of having OCR technology as part of their workflow,” said Ivan Bodyagin, director of the FineReader Products Department at ABBYY. 

“FineReader Pro for Mac is designed to provide the functionality and performance to support a wide spectrum of needs, from casual document conversion tasks to rather complex projects. With its availability, Mac users can finally realise the full benefits of OCR technology.”

Aimed to simplify everyday work with documents and images, FineReader Pro for Mac streamlines tasks which have historically been time-consuming for Mac users. The solution provides tools for scanning documents and converting images of documents such as scans, photographs and PDFs into popular formats including DOCX, ODT, RTF, XLSX, searchable and protected PDF and PDF/A, PPTX, HTML, EPUB, and FB2. 

In addition, it allows users to process and recognise only selected areas on a document to quickly copy and quote information they need without having to process the entire document. FineReader Pro for Mac can also be effectively used to prepare documents for use by various text-to-speech utilities.

Key features include:

1. Up to 99.8 percent accuracy of character recognition.Automatically detects and recognizes text in more than 180 languages.
2. Converting to Microsoft Word, PDF, and Apache OpenOffice Writer with Native Formatting 
3. Intuitive user interface designed to reduce the amount of steps typically required to process documents to a single click of a button.

Users can photograph documents for OCR and conversion by using their cameras and mobile devices as alternatives to common scanners. Depending on the image, FineReader Pro for Mac applies various image pre-processing options to correct possible distortions before recognition. An Image Editor  can also correct brightness and contrast, straighten curved text lines, correct trapezium distortions, reduce ISO noise, remove motion blur, split dual pages and crop images.

As well as turning documents into searchable, compressed and protected PDF files, it can also create PDF outlines for fast navigation across a document, support tagged PDFs that are optimised for portable and screen reader devices, and export to  the PDF/A format for long-term archiving.  

The application can be easily used to convert paper documents and images to formats supported by e-book readers, tablet PCs and smartphones, including the popular Electronic Publication (.ePub) and FictionBook (.fb2) formats. 

FineReader Pro for Mac is now available for purchase via the Mac App Store and the ABBYY Online store. Users of ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac can upgrade their copy to the full professional version of FineReader at a special price. For more information about the product and pricing, visit www.abbyy.com/finereader_for_mac/ .