OCR is a software category where there's one clear winner and everything else is an also-ran. Year after year, Abbyy FineReader gets our Editors' Choice for optical character recognition software, and year after year, it gets even better. The newly released Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional ($169.99) is another evolutionary advance for this already-powerful app, but with one major new convenience feature: Unlike earlier versions, the new one lets you start fine-tuning its OCR results almost instantly, instead of waiting until it processes an entire document. While the app is still reading the later pages of a document, you can work on earlier pages, adding or removing regions of text for the program to analyze, deleting unwanted pages, and more.

FineReader always excelled in analyzing page layout and interpreting imperfect document images, but now it does the job faster and more conveniently.

The Right FineReader for You

As in earlier versions, FineReader Pro 12 is the only app you need to handle any OCR task, from converting a smartphone pic of an invoice into an editable document, all the way to producing a searchable PDF from scanned images of a thousand-page book printed in multiple languages. Considering FineReader Pro's price, however, you might prefer something cheaper—like Abbyy's own TextGrabber ($14.99)—if you want to perform OCR on your iPhone or Android device.

Where FineReader Pro shines (and has no serious competition) is in large-scale and automated OCR for business and research. It's designed equally well for automated mass production OCR in a corporate setting—converting legacy documents into searchable text—and for fine-tuned OCR processing by individual researchers working with documents from the distant past.

Using FineReader 12 Professional

FineReader's startup screen lets you choose among common tasks like scanning an image into a Word document or converting photos of tabular data into an Excel spreadsheet. You can also scan a document or convert an existing image into ePub formats (including FictionPub and DjVu) for e-readers and book-reading applications.

Over the years, I've used earlier versions of FineReader to convert thousands of pages of old magazine articles and books into editable documents. Nothing else comes close to the speed and efficiency of FineReader's error-correcting features.

An image editor lets you increase contrast, straighten lines, invert 80-year-old white-on-black photostats into scannable black-on-white images, and reduce speckles and noise on old Xerox copies. The spell-checker is so well designed that I found it a snap to zip through complex changes and corrections with a few efficient taps on the keyboard and a minimum of awkward mouse-acrobatics. And the latest version includes a menu of common math operators and other symbols so you can insert these symbols directly into the OCR output instead of waiting until you open it in a word processor or spreadsheet.

One other way I use FineReader is to take a downloaded PDF from Google Books or similar sources—a PDF that won't let you search for text—and convert into a fully searchable file that still looks like the original. Adobe Acrobat (from $19.99 per month for Acrobat XI Pro) includes an OCR feature that can perform the same task, but Adobe's homegrown OCR can't begin to approach FineReader's accuracy.

I used the latest version of FineReader Pro to convert a PDF of a 19th-century book printed in German, Latin, and Old English—and the results, though imperfect, were very impressive. I told FineReader to look for German and Latin text, and it did an excellent job. Unsurprisingly, it displayed warnings about the Old English text, saying I probably needed to specify a different language—but then it went ahead and did a good enough job of producing OCR text from the Old English that I was able search the document.

With previous versions of FineReader, when you used the app to create a searchable PDF from a scanned original, the app produced a PDF that looked slightly less clear than the original—still readable, but with some pixelation in smaller type. The new version introduces a technology called PreciseScan that smoothes the fonts in the output document so that it's almost indistinguishable from the original.

Redaction, Automation, and Windows 8

Other features I like in FineReader include a redaction tool that lets you permanently remove data from a scanned image before converting it to an output format. Law and government offices that still use WordPerfect will value FineReader's ability to send scanned output to WordPerfect in addition to Microsoft Office. You can also send output to a Web browser, or send it directly from FineReader via email.

Users of the high-corporate version can automate all these features in custom-built tasks that work like the quick tasks supplied with the program—for example, to export a PDF document into a Word or Excel file.

Like it or not, the Windows 8 era has long since arrived, so FineReader's interface, like most other high-powered apps, now has a flat-look interface with large simple icons for major features and basic tasks, although the dialog boxes look more or less they always did. I find the new interface marginally more spacious and convenient than that of earlier versions, with new options for quickly rearranging the workspace to focus on different tasks. In another Windows 8-era change, Abbyy says the new version has been modified to work smoothly with touch screens, though I haven't tried it.

Abbyy FineReader 12 Professional is the most powerful and convenient OCR application on the planet, and it's our no-contest Editors' Choice in its field.