Thursday, 22 November 2007 - Canon Australia announces the immediate availability of award-winning OCR software to complement small to medium-sized businesses and network workgroup document management solutions. ABBYY FineReader is an optical character recognition (OCR) application designed specifically for network environments.

ABBYY FineReader 9.0 is based on new recognition platform built around Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ADRT). This intelligent system is designed to create editable files while retaining native document formatting. It's possible to convert paper documents, PDF and image files into convenient, editable electronic data, saving time and effort.

ABBYY FineReader provides comprehensive and easy-to-use document conversion capabilities which allow users to readily transform documents, images and PDF files into editable and searchable electronic files. The software delivers precision accuracy in converting any type of document and is a cost-effective and time-saving alternative to manually retyping documents.

High-quality layout analysis and retention capabilities mean that the layout of any source document is retained exactly. Even poor quality inputs and those with complex layouts are handled with precision. Overall document recognition accuracy has been improved in version 9.0 by as much as 35%, even on complex or difficult to read documents and low quality images. The recognition results of ABBYY FineReader OCR exceed 99% on a standard document.

Corporate Edition Version 9.0 offers concurrent licensing and is the only product on the market to include direct support for distributed document processing over a network. This award-winning software is ideal for businesses that want to increase the efficiency of their information processing and document archiving. If you're looking for an easy way to transform mountains of paper into manageable data, FineReader is for you.

Corporate users can monitor input folders or schedule OCR processing with the new Mailbox watching function which allows FineReader to automatically recognise attachments sent via Canon MFDs. In addition, the Corporate Edition is designed for collaboration and can work with shared dictionaries and watched "Hot Folders" to schedule batch OCR processing.


Industry Standard File Format Support
FineReader is designed to support a comprehensive range of commonly-used and industry standard file formats to maximise compatibility, including the PDF/A archiving format recommended as a standard for long-term preservation of documents. FineReader 9.0 can also save files in the new DOCX and XLSX formats found in Microsoft Office 2007. Input image formats include GIF and XPS (XML Paper Specification), a new format for document viewing and storage developed by Microsoft. Other supported formats include HTML, XML, DOC, XLS, PPT, DBF, TXT and LIT.

Usability has also been enhanced thanks to a new results-driven user interface that offers straightforward user guidance, anticipation of a user's logical next step, and a 40-percent reduction in the number of required mouse clicks to accomplish a task over previous versions.