free ABBYY Screenshot Reader

[Curt]

ABBYY Screenshot Reader is free during December:

http://www.abbyy.com/bonusSR/

* Size 153 MB

Learn how to use ABBYY Screenshot Reader

Create your own “snapshots” of images and texts from opened documents, file menus, Web pages, presentations, or PDF files with just several clicks.

ABBYY Screenshot Reader features

   Easily creates screenshots that can be saved in standard image formats or used as images in documents

   Quickly turns text areas in screenshots into truly editable text that can be saved as Microsoft Word or Excel documents or inserted directly into open applications

   Support of multiple languages:
       15 interface languages, including Chinese, Brazilian, Portuguese, Japanese
       Extracts text in 179 languages
       Converts texts of the main modern character sets – Latin, Greek, Cyrilliс, Chinese

[Ath]

Dupe, reported over here

[Curt]

-oh, I didn't know.

Well, at least now it has been reported the proper place ;-)

[40hz]

Well, at least now it has been reported the proper place ;-)

Right you are Curt!

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

Kewl, I use this tool continually to take both image pics and text OCR pics of fair use material from books for research projects.

Its an incredible deal at the regular price (I paid about $10 or $12) .. free is simply better. 

Please do not let the low price fool you, or the simplicity of function.  This is a top-of-the-line product for internet-to-text (e.g. books from google books and archive.org) use.    Even the German, French etc. functions help occasionally, to give you those umlauts from the text.

You may use a special program for sending a fifty-page document to OCR. (Although once you know how to handle this, it goes quick.)  And there may be some that are better on the difficult text (very small, although there a magnifier program can help... or weird fonts, like old books).  Yet even there, in most cases the hand cleanup is easy.  The biggest weakness that they could improve involve the difficult fonts and some e comes out as c. (I think they do not spell-check.) However, again, this is only on touchy fonts.

Shalom,
Steven

[Curt]

One minor annoyance is that the ABBYY licensing service is forced to start with Windows, even if the mother program doesn't. The program will not accept this service to be moved to "Start on demand", but will however accept a delayed start,..., which again is difficult for the user to do, because most startup managers cannot delay such services,..., but a program like AnVir Task Manager Pro can do it.

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

And I had one short period of real annoyance about the startup service thing. And I wrote to Abbyy and got a decent response, which I may have posted on DC. 

Since this is a service I use virtually every session it is not a factor for me, but I understand that it is for some.  Plus, afaik, there really is no comparable product anywhere at a sensible price.

While you can easily duplicate the picture-taking capability with many products, you cannot do so with the text OCR. Often I take a pic of a paragraph, stick it in my email, Eudora, which is my normal text editor too, then OCR the same pic, so when I clean up any letter problems the two are right in front of me. 

Another trick is combining small pics into one, since my outgoing email tends to choke on too many pics (more than 3 or 4, it can get confused as to which is which).

And I would not mind using some good utility, disk or cloud, for combining when the sections are long I can not do it within an email since I am working with "screen-space".  I have not tested that idea yet, of combining longer sections, since it is only a light occasional need.

Steven

[Curt]

It should be noted that the 153MB ABBYY Screenshot Reader still can be retrieved for free, and that it is at version 5988 - meaning NOW is a good time to get it, before the most-likely-not-so-free version 6 is launched. However, you need to first answer a few fair questions  and give your email address: http://www.abbyy.com/screenshot_reader_bonus/

Edit:
I got the version's number wrong. It is at version 9.0 ... "part 5988" - so it must be quite new?

[IainB]

@Curt: Thanks for this. ABBYY Screenshot Reader is a really useful tool (as discussed elsewhere on DCF).
I had suggested to someone in another forum that it might still available for free, but was not sure (had not checked) - you just found it was.
I shall have to update my copy...

[rgdot]

Stupid question I guess but can someone shed light on why the size? 153MB?

[lanux128]

the version i have expands to 354,501,851 bytes upon installation..

[attach=#]

[IainB]

I had my wires crossed on this. Have just straightened them out after reading my installation notes and double-checking program versions:

The thing is, the Christmas giveaway version is actually quite an old version.

• Believing it to be the latest version at the time, on 2011-12-14 I installed the FREE ABBY Screenshot Reader "RETAIL" (Christmas giveaway) software from http://fr7.abbyy.com/ScreenshotReader/ScreenshotReader_ESD.exe
  It turned out that this "RETAIL" version is apparently an older version (v9.0.0.1331) to the one I had already installed with my EPSON scanner (see below).
  So I uninstalled it without hiccup on 2012-01-22, as it was duplication with file of approx. 330Mb and it duplicated a licence server service (you cannot seem to run the ABBY software without having that service running). One less overhead.
  
• The apparently newer version (v9.0.0.1354) was actually installed almost a year earlier on 2011-02-20, as part of the EPSON scanner install +ABBY FineReader 9.0 Sprint software.
  I posted about the excellent scanner and associated software (including screenshots of the ABBY Screenshot Reader OCR output) in DCF:
  EPSON Perfection V330 Photo Scanner + ABBY and ArcSoft software on: 2011-02-20, 20:21:30.

The conclusion to all this is:

• (a) If you do not already have the ABBY Screenshot Reader, then get the FREE ABBY Screenshot Reader "RETAIL" (Christmas giveaway) software from http://fr7.abbyy.com/ScreenshotReader/ScreenshotReader_ESD.exe (if it is still available).
  It is an excellent and useful piece of software.  
  
• (b) If you (like me) already have ABBY software installed/bundled with a scanner install, then check to see what version of ABBY Screenshot Reader you might have had installed with it, before (like me) making the mistake of downloading a possibly older Christmas giveaway version.
  My scanner-installed version was v9.0.0.1354 (a newer version).
  The 2011-12 Christmas giveaway version was v9.0.0.1331 (an older version).

[tomos]

^ Iain, I'm confused
-
Curt says his link above (reply #7) is for version "5988" which I presume is 9.0.0.5988.

If I am correct there, you're comparing two older versions (?)

[IainB]

^ Iain, I'm confused
Curt says his link above (reply #7) is for version "5988" which I presume is 9.0.0.5988.
If I am correct there, you're comparing two older versions (?)

I was confused about this too.
It seems to be Part# 5xxx(x) - i.e., 4 or 5 digits - not version/build number.
Here's the details for my installed version:
[attach]

[Curt]

I guess it was my words that were wrong. It happened because I haven't yet installed my new version, so I didn't dare to call it 9.0.0.1134#5988 - or whatever version it is - but skipped the (unknown) "1134", saying "9.00 ... 5988" (the exe is named ...setup5988)
My bad.  

Edit:
All the content of the setup file is stamped January 2009...

[IainB]

I just checked and you can apparently still get the FREE ABBY Screenshot Reader "RETAIL" (2011 Christmas giveaway) software - download from http://fr7.abbyy.com/ScreenshotReader/ScreenshotReader_ESD.exe

The "newer" version I have (dated 2009-11-20) seems to work just the same as the giveaway version (apparently dated 2009-01), so I don't know what the difference is - if any.

[IainB]

This relates to the above discussion and some separate discussions:
As a result of pursuing the idea of getting OCR data out of any text-containing images in my CHS database (per this request here: Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images.), I "Ducked" (DuckDuckgo) for things relevant to the subject, and happened upon this interesting post:

FREE OCR software: a survey of desktop and online tools - freewaregenius.com
Jun 18, 2013 By Priit 35 Comments
...
16. ABBYY Screenshot Reader
ABBYY Screenshot Reader is a screen capture software that can do screenshot OCR on the fly. Excellent recognition quality, amazing number of 160+ input languages can be selected, also multiple languages at a time. It can nicely handle data tables. ABBYY Screenshot Reader is reviewed here.
...
[attach]