ABBYY's FineReader(R) Engine(R) 8.0 With Extended Platform Support Supports Linux(R), FreeBSD(R), Mac OS(R) X (Intel(R))

September 27, 2006; 03:16 AM

ABBYY, a world leader in the development of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies, today announced a new edition of its FineReader Engine 8.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) to support additional platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and the Mac OS X (Intel). FineReader Engine 8.0 is a recognition and PDF conversion SDK for developing software applications such as archiving, content/document management, and document conversion. Based on ABBYY's latest technology platform, the new edition of FineReader Engine 8.0 is the most advanced and accurate OCR SDK for Linux, FreeBDS, Mac OS X.

The FineReader Engine SDK is used to build applications of any scale and complexity -- from simple client applications to server-based, distributed projects. The SDK comes with command line interface, and daemon with ready to use functions. As a result, developers are able to quickly plug in OCR functions into their applications for rapid deployment. In addition, the flexible, modular architecture and pricing model allow developers to choose only functions and features they need, while maintaining the ability to extend the current functionally of applications as needed.

"Today's developers have a variety of options to choose from when developing their applications," said Alexander Rylov, ABBYY Chief Product Manager. "FineReader Engine 8.0 is an accurate, recognition and conversion platform with a variety of specialized functions for creation of searchable PDF files for archiving, processing of digital camera images, capture of field and zone data, and recognition of barcodes. With this new version, Linux or BSD developers can now take advantage of this functionality."

Highlighted Features and Benefits:

--  Recognition Accuracy: Based on the company's latest recognition and document analysis technology, version 8.0 is 30% more accurate then the previous version from ABBYY, and is over 60% more accurate than other OCR SDKs commercially available for these platforms.  Enhanced image pre-processing has higher accuracy on documents that are difficult to process such as newsprint, faxes, multi-generations photo copies, and magazine pages as well as Digital Camera OCR™ technology that treats and corrects digital camera images with distortions.
    
--  Enhanced PDF conversion and output: superior accuracy when converting PDF files created from scanning (Image PDFs) and PDFs with special encoding through the use of two-step "intelligent PDF processing." Output to tagged, searchable PDF formats, plus support for security and encryption settings.
    
--  Variety of Output formats: PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML, XML, and XLS. Bullet points and special picture shapes, as well as general formatting are preserved in output documents and character information (formatting, word/character varieties, etc. via API and XML output).
    
--  Multilingual: recognizes up to 189 OCR languages (more than any other existing OCR software), including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
    
--  Multilevel and special document analysis: To meet the demands of indexing and archiving solutions, FineReader Engine 8.0 maintains special document-oriented processing modes to analyze and extract data from documents during document processing tasks such as document conversion, full-text indexing and invoice pre-processing.
    
--  Barcode Recognition: Support for more than 17 varieties of 1D barcode, plus PDF 417 2D barcode.
    
--  Field Level/Zonal Recognition: By recognizing key information from snippets of image, field level or zonal recognition enables processing tasks including keyword indexing and keyword classification. Multilingual and barcode recognition, as well as definition of field content, detection of in-filed spacing, processing of blocks with intersecting parts and lines, recognition of text words and symbols completely located within block borders, and text block despeckle are possible.
    
--  Throughput Management: Optimal recognition accuracy and processing speed for applications. The balance processing mode and «ready-to-load profiles» reduce time spent choosing proper parameters for common usage scenarios (e.g. conversion to searchable PDF, field-level recognition, archiving, and indexing).    

Specifications, Availability and Pricing

ABBYY FineReader Engine 8.0 consists of a set of libraries that makes the core OCR functionality easily accessible for developers via an API or the Command Line Interface. Platforms supported include RedHat® Linux, Fedora™ Core, SUSE® Linux Enterprise, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (Intel). ABBYY offers special services for porting FineReader technology to other platforms.

The SDK is sold in Developer Licenses and Run Time Licenses, with special Add-on modules for certain functionality. A special time-limited trial version is also available for test. The full product is scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 2006. Information on licensing models, pricing, and other technical information is available from your local ABBYY office. For additional product and sales information, please visit www.ABBYY.com.

About ABBYY

ABBYY develops linguistic and artificial intelligence (AI) software providing a full line of document recognition, conversion and data capture technologies and products. ABBYY's products include: FineReader OCR systems -- a family of end-user programs and development tools for recognition of printed text, tables and forms; FormReader™ -- an ICR program for recognition and processing of hand-printed forms; and ABBYY FlexiCapture™ Studio -- a software tool that helps to extract data from semi-structured forms and documents. Companies that license ABBYY recognition technologies include industry leaders such as EMC, EPSON, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Kofax, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Siemens Nixdorf, Stellent, Sumitomo Electric Systems, and Toshiba.