It must be 20 years ago or more that I first stumbled upon the OCR software, Abbyy Finereader. I was enthralled, and I bought it, with the option for Cyrillic recognition. At the time the word was that it had originally been developed for the KGB! It was much better than anything else.
Since that day I have bought every upgrade. These appeared every couple of years, and always gave you a bit better OCR. The user interface was not really improved tho – they tended to mess with it, when it worked really very well. And currently I am using Abbyy Finereader 15 Pro. This is a wonderful OCR engine. In the last couple of versions, the software developers have gone a bit insane, and started forcing you to produce PDF as your output. But in fact they don’t do PDFs that well! Never mind – it is still possible to just do straight OCR. The addition of the Fraktur module is good also.
But … disaster! I learn today that the idiots and nincompoops at Abbyy have decided to make it available only on a “subscription” model. You can’t buy it any more. Instead they will lease it to you for a year, for the same price as a purchase used to be. At the end of the year, you have to pay again. And again.
I have never purchased a subscription for any software, and I never will. This is predatory pricing, and it should be illegal.
We all know that Microsoft have their “Office 365” subscription. A few years back I was horrified to find that a poor girl living on benefits was paying for a subscription. She had to count every penny; yet Microsoft was bleeding her each month. I quickly put a stop to that, I should say.
Last month I discovered that my late mother had also been taken in by this scam, and was paying a monthly sum to Microsoft just to do basic word-processing.
This is classic monopoly abuse. Create a monopoly, then force people to accept predatory prices that benefit only the monopolist. Instead of bringing in better software each year, so that people want to buy something better, how much easier it is to just force them to pay again for the same thing?
Microsoft can get away with it, because word-processing is essential, and they have donated heavily to the US political establishment.
But I rather doubt that Abbyy has a monopoly. All they have done is to ensure that I don’t buy any more upgrades.
All the same, it’s a shame. Abbyy Finereader really was good. I always recommended it.
Those who don’t feel like being robbed like this may wish to know that Google Docs does OCR for free, and for an even wider range of languages than Abbyy.
I have been OCRing for some years with PDF-Xchange Editor, and very good it is, offering various adjustments for very little outlay.
Recently however I came across UPDF which is free and better – it reads stuff the other one can’t. So I use that.
I have used ABBYY for years, and recently digitized my entire print library of about 1,000 books with it. It is the best OCR software that I have found, overall. The German Fraktur does a pretty good job, which is why I upgraded to 15. But, like you, I do not want to go the subscription model, especially now that I have my library digitized and will only be doing whatever new books I buy (I turn them into searchable pdfs). I suppose 15 will run a few more years for me. My question is whether, in your experience, Google Docs can match reasonably close the accuracy of ABBYY? I suppose I could try it, but I am assuming that you already have on multiple occasions and could give a fair opinion.
No, I’ve done very little with Google Docs. Abbyy Finereader has always been my OCR of choice. As you say, 15 will continue to run for a few more years yet.
It’s a mad, mad decision.
I used OmniPage 11 through 17 for a number of years with good success. Then I switched to tesseract, and never looked back.
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr
It has no subscription, and is open source.
I have used it with good succcess on English, Latin, and Greek texts.
I don’t like subscription programs either.
Omnipage was never as good as Finereader tho.