ABBYY Finereader version 15 has just been released.
-brahman
I tested the trial a bit. Produces quite quick and accurate OCR, is my first impression.
But: I can't find a mode that comes close to Acrobat's "Editable Text and Images" (older name was "ClearScan") where the image bitmap text characters are replaced by custom vector fonts that look like the original but smoother.
Finereader 15 has an option called PreciseScan that claims to do some smoothing but I didn't see much smoothing improvement compared to when that option is off. I only did a a few quick tests though.
Samples
Acrobat vectorized setting
Finereader 15 with setting PreciseScan
brahman, do you know the ins and outs of Finereader and if so can you tell me if I've missed some Finereader 15 setting to produce vectorized output similar to the Acrobat sample above? (I know I can have Finereader replace the bitmap text with OCRed text in a different Windows font of course, but that's not what I'm after here.)