Tsailing Merrem, director of marketing, adds that ABBYY's fine-tuned FineReader especially for those markets with features unavailable in Acrobat. One of those is OCR (optical character recognition) of JPEG files of book or document pages taken with digital cameras. She says both students and lawyers—two user groups that don't typically share much in common—are doing a lot of that.

Merrem says that students—especially those in college—are leading the charge in digital camera capture of paper books and documents, in an effort to lighten their backpacks, which are getting heavier and heaver with books and electronic gear.

"Wherever they go, students have to take textbooks—remember how heavy they were?—and now they have their PDA, cell phone and their laptop computer," Merrem says.

Lawyers, who are typically obsessed with lowering their bottom lines, see camera OCR as a way to cut labor-intensive scan-to-PDF research fees—and at the least, copy-machine charges in situations where a courthouse doesn't make PDFs accessible online—by doing it themselves. The legal market has two cases where paper-to-PDF processes enter into the workflow: the first is during the discovery phase of trials, where both sides exchange documentation, and second, during contract negotiations.

Because they're not perfectly flat, it's tricky to prepare for OCR open book pages or wrinkled, dog-eared 8x11 sheets shot with a camera. Software such as FineReader and Nuance's OminPage must "look" at a spread and conduct considerable pre-processing on JPEGs to make the pages appear to the software as if someone had pressed them down on a scanner bed.

FineReader 9 adds tuned-up header and footer recognition, as well as signature recognition. That doesn't mean FineReader can read handwriting but instead it can understand where a handwritten signature—such as on a judge's decree—is on a page, and leaves it intact. The feature can also sniff out company stamps and logos.

Automation of this formerly manual process saves a lot of time for workers in legal and government offices charged with converting paper documents to PDFs, Merrem says. Research markets—namely academic and pharmaceutical—find FineReader's feature set useful, too, she adds. Academicians in particular are running what she calls "a race against time" to get books that are out of copyright converted from paper to PDF, especially old or obscure titles with one or two extant copies among the world's university libraries.

Another feature new to FineReader 9 is output to PDF/A, the electronic archiving format upon which many government agencies, courts, and educational institutions are standardizing. Merrem sees that application for PDF growing for years to come, as more and more organizations adopt PDF/A.

"The technology industry is notorious for coming up with a new format—remember the Betamax—and a new medium for that format, and that is why paper is still around," Merrem says, adding that although Acrobat and Reader are supposedly backward-compatible, she's even got old PDFs that won't open in new versions.

"I think PDF/A is a really good move. Adobe took 12 years to make it a standard. [That's why] the government, and the entire education and research communities are choosing to use PDF/A."

Other features of note in FineReader 9 include:

Document processing optimized for dual- and quad-core machines

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