Finereader 11 looks quite a lot like Finereader 10. So far, it seems very similar. Once nice touch is that when it is reading a page, a vertical bar travels down the thumbnail.
But I have already found an oddity. I imported into it the project that I am currently working on in Finereader 10 — part of Ibn Abi Usaibia — and it looks really weird! All the recognised text is spaced out vertically! The paragraph style is “bar code”, and no other styles are available.
Here’s what I see when I open it:
- Opening a Finereader 10 project in Finereader 11
Not very useful, is it? But when I minimise the image, and increase the recognised panel to 100% size, it looks like this!
- Finereader 11 – zoomed version of recognised text
There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the massive gaps between lines. And here is the very same project in Finereader 10:
- Finereader 10 image of same document
Weird. Doubtless there is some setting to persuade FR11 to behave, but it isn’t obvious what. This does NOT happen when I recognise the page again in FR11. The style gets set to “Body Text (2)”, in this case.
And … when I do Ctrl-Z, and revert the recognition, it goes back to the weird appearance above. But … this time, a bunch of other styles are available, and if I change to BodyText2, that is what I get. But on the next page … once again, Barcode is the only style.
This must be a bug, I think. It means that Abbyy’s testers have not tested importing documents from FR10 sufficiently. What it means is that you can’t upgrade projects once you start them. Well … I try to keep my projects small, and break up large documents into small chunks, so I shan’t mind. That would seem to be the workaround.
One good feature that is new, is that it remembers where you were in the document last time. All previous versions always opened the document at page 1. I got quite accustomed, indeed, to placing a “qqq” at the point where I stopped, so I could find it again next time. No need in FR11, it seems.
Also FR11 comes bundled with “PDF Transformer 3”. This suggests that the latter product was bought in, to beef up the rather unremarkable PDF handling in Finereader. I’ve not tried this yet, tho.