Given that the previous generation of optical character recognition (OCR) programs all offered better than 99 percent accuracy, the big question for these programs today is not how accurate they are but what else they can do. Abbyy FineReader 8.0 Professional Edition ($399.99 direct) answers that question with tools to improve recognition on a wider range of originals, notably digital photos, books, and PDF files. That takes it in a different direction from its main competitor, OmniPage Professional 15, which added ancillary features like file conversion and a form creation tool.

FineReader 8.0, similar in many ways to OmniPage, follows the same design as earlier versions. Its main screen shows thumbnails of pages on the left, a graphic image of the currently selected page in the middle, and an editing pane with recognized text on the right. But FineReader adds a Zoom pane across the bottom that displays a magnified version of the area in the image you're currently editing. You can also send the text to Word to edit and correct, with the Zoom pane still active.

A welcome new feature is the ability to define common OCR tasks to run with a single command. For example, one predefined procedure asks you to pick an image file, then opens the file, recognizes the text, and sends the result to Word. A wizard makes it easy to define your own procedures.

In a new twist for PDFs, FineReader checks to see if they have embedded text and, if so, compares a small sample of recognized text with the embedded text. If the embedded text seems accurate—as it will if the file was generated from, say, a Word document—FineReader will read the text and speed up the process. If the embedded test is inaccurate—as it may be if it was generated from an image file—FineReader will take the time to recognize the text instead.

FineReader also extends the practical range for OCR. In particular, recognizing book pages is a challenge because the three-dimensional curve in open book pages translates to curved text lines in scanned pages. FineReader 8.0 lets you split the image between left and right facing pages, and then straighten the text before recognizing it, to improve accuracy.

More intriguing is the ability to import photos directly from a camera to recognize text. It can sometimes be handy to take a photo of a magazine or book page while you're on the go, to recognize it later. But photos aren't as high-quality as scanned images. Abbyy says its new adaptive technology improves recognition for text in photos by 40 percent. On our tests, it did a good enough job for the result to be useful, even without taking pains to shoot the best possible photo.

With its new automation and wider range of originals that can be recognized, FineReader maintains its position as one of the best OCR programs available.