A Russian software developer its trying to bridge the price gap between the free optical-character recognition software that comes with scanners and the high-end, high-cost commercial applications like Adobe Systems, Inc.'s Acrobat. 

ABBYY Software House, whose higher-end product is FineReader 9.0, has introduced FineReader Express Edition, a $49 OCR package aimed at small offices and consumers.

The idea behind the "lite" edition of the company's flagship FineReader, says ABBYY senior marketing manager Wendy Wang, is to enable scanner end-users to make better use of their gear without paying several hundred dollars to upgrade the OCR that came with the scanner.

That, in effect, means they need to be able to put a piece of paper on their scanner bed and be able to create electronic PDF archives for papers such as receipts, faxes, and even book excerpts shot with digital cameras—and not worry about document settings, or for that matter, error-ridden files that don't work.

"One click does everything, it doesn't require a lot of experience using OCR," Wang says. "A lot of the customers won't even know what OCR is."

Inexpensive software or shareware that comes with many scanners just doesn't handle OCR well, and the versions of better-known OCR packages provided by hardware vendors are often several revisions out of date, Wang says.

Interestingly, more and more consumers and workers in certain professional vertical markets—such as lawyers—are using digital cameras instead of copy machines to shoot pictures of documents, which they bring back to the office for later OCR operations.

"The population of people using scanners is not as big as the population using digital cameras," Wang says. "Almost every household has a digital camera."

And that's not even counting cell-phone digital cameras, many of which aren't quite good enough to capture text that can later be run through OCR software—but they're getting better. As they improve, and more and more consumers get comfortable with the technology, they're going to want to use them to capture paper to be saved digitally—and turned into searchable documents via OCR.

Not many consumer or budget PDF software applications contain OCR. FineReader Express's main competitor, Nuance, does include its OmniPage OCR engine in its similarly priced PDF Converter 5.   Nitro PDF says that its 6.0 version—due out at some point in 2009—will include OCR. Both the competitors do (or will do) something FineReader Express doesn't: Runs OCR on existing PDFs.