BIOS: Technology Means Business

ABBYY has announced that it has extended its FineReader Engine 8.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) with a new version designed specifically for developers working with Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X (Intel) platforms.

“Today’s developers have a variety of powerful options to choose from when developing their applications,” said Alexander Rylov, ABBYY Chief Product Manager.

“FineReader Engine 8.0 is a powerful recognition and conversion platform with a variety of specialised functions for the 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, developers working with Linux or BSD platforms can now take advantage of this functionality.”

ABBYY FineReader Engine provides an efficient and flexible way to integrate OCR, barcode recognition and PDF conversion technologies into a wide variety of applications including: archiving and storage, content/document management, control and verification, document conversion and data capture. By converting scanned documents or PDF files into editable and searchable file formats, it enables document searching, republishing, and information capture for input into databases.

Based on ABBYY’s latest recognition and document analysis technology, this new SDK is by far the most accurate OCR engine ever developed for the Linux platform, claims the company. Version 8.0 offers a 30 per cent boost in accuracy compared with previous versions from ABBYY, and is over 60 per cent more accurate then other OCR SDKs commercially available for the Linux. In addition, this SDK includes advanced document analysis capabilities specifically optimised for different recognition tasks, such as invoice pre-processing and full-text indexing. Users can choose different document analysis algorithms for each particular task.

The SDK offers powerful PDF conversion features such as support for all types of PDF files; extraction and re-creation of internal links and hyperlinks; advanced PDF security setting and encryption support; output in tagged PDF format; and the ability to add document metadata to PDF output.

FineReader technology recognises 189 OCR languages (more than any other existing OCR software), including Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. In addition, it supports a broad array of fonts, including dot matrix print texts, old European fonts (such as Fraktur) and most Gothic fonts, as well as specialised fonts used by the finance industry, such as OCR-A, OCR-B, and MICR (E13B).

ABBYY FineReader Engine 8.0 with Extended Platform Support has been tested to work with operating environments from leading vendors including RedHat Linux, Fedora Core, SUSE Linux Enterprise, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (Intel). In addition, ABBYY’s technical team offers special services for porting FineReader technology to other platforms.

The FineReader technology can be used to build applications of any scale and complexity - from simple client applications to server-based, distributed projects. 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.

ABBYY FineReader Engine first supported development on the Linux platform in 2003. Since then, ABBYY development teams have been working with a variety of companies and developers working on various platforms to offer the best combination of functionality and platform support.

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. 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 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, visit www.abbyy.com.

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