Description of App
FineScanner, from world-leading OCR software company ABBYY, turns your mobile device into a powerful all-purpose mobile scanner to quickly capture docs and books, creating electronic copies in PDF and JPG, and apply online OCR to recognize texts from scans for further editing and sharing.
Use your iPhone/iPad with FineScanner to scan paper documents, books, agreements, receipts, magazine articles, notes, recipes, pictures, charts, tables, slides, whiteboards or even billboards on the street and get perfect digital copies. Ideal for individuals, business, government or school use - anytime, anywhere.
KEY FEATURES
- PDF & JPG. Scan any printed or hand-written text and save scans to JPEG images or cross-platform PDF documents.
- BOOKSCAN TECH. Enable the Book mode in your camera and take snapshots of facing book pages. BookScan will split the opposing pages into two separate images and correct any distortions and lighting defects. It will then unbend any curved lines as if you pressed the book against the glass of a conventional scanner.
- OCR. Recognize text (OCR) on scans in 193 languages (including Latin, Cyrillic, and CJK alphabets) and choose from among 12 output formats (docx, pdf, txt, and more), preserving the original document formatting such as lists, tables, and headers (up to 100 pages per document)
- 3D TOUCH & SPOTLIGHT. In iOS 9, with iPhone 6s/6s+, access or find documents by pressing the app icon a little bit harder. Spotlight Search allows you to find any scans from iPhone home screen.
- PASSWORD ON PDF. Add a password for the image-only PDF files while exporting and sending via email
- MULTIPAGE DOCS. Create, edit, and enhance separate images or large multi-page documents without any additional selection on viewfinder (up to 100 pages per document).
- AUTO-CAPTURE AND FILTERS. Excellent visual quality with auto-capture of page boundaries and advanced image filters, which processes scans in color, greyscale or black-and-white versions.
- BEST-SHOT PHOTO MODE. Select Best-shot button on viewfinder and FineScanner automatically chooses and processes the best of three images captured.
- BUILT-IN FILE STORAGE. Save scans inside app with tags and search capabilities
- SHARE & EXPORT. Send results by e-mail, save in cloud storages - iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Yandex.Disk, Evernote and more, transfer docs to your Mac or PC using iTunes sharing.
- AIRPRINT. Print out scans directly from your iPhone or iPad.
The application is not compatible with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS and is not recommended for use on the iPod Touch or iPad 1, 2, because cameras on these devices do not support auto focus.
Send any questions, suggestions, or accessibility comments to support@abbyy.com
Accessibility Comments
The app is fully functional using VoiceOver apart from one thing, I had problems switching it to the Document mode using the "doc" button on the Camera screen. Few times the Document mode was truly applied after selecting it, but I can't tell how I managed to do so.
However, the Book mode can be used for all kinds of scanned objects, so it's not a big problem, and might be even preferable because it applies some extra processing to correct the defects in the image.
Feedback and button labeling could be also better, so it takes some time to get the hang of it.
The most serious issue is with text recognition accessed through the "frolOCR" button. The problem is that OCR won't return any result if there are too many defects in the image, even though it would actually be able to recognize at least pieces of text. It looks like there is some threshold of the amount of text recognized which tells when it is worth of returning something. This measure makes FineScanner quite inappropriate for visually impaired users, as they can hardly capture the image properly without defects, and because they often just want to find what is the document roughly about, as even bits of poorly recognized text can help them.
Related thing is that FineScanner doesn't provide any feedback to a VoiceOver user to notify them that OCR has been finished or that not enough text was recognized to retrieve any result. Thus you have to repeatedly check the OCR button at the middle bottom of the screen, which will either show an alert that the document is still being recognized, or open a new screen with the recognized text, or again open the OCR setting screen, which means the server decided not to return anything worth of retrieving.
I was told by the ABBYY support that my suggestions to let the app retrieve at least pieces of text and to provide better feedback to a VoiceOver user will be taken for a consideration. So, with respect to the fact that in my small test, FineScanner turned out to have the best OCR precision compared to knfbReader and TextGrabber, we might find this app to be a good choice in the future.
Another issue is that all the scanned documents appear as "document cell" item in the list no matter what name they are given, though they are at least categorized by the month they were taken. You have to double-tap them to read their name in the detail screen.