New input formats: Office documents

• A new set of input formats was added to ABBYY FineReader Engine. In addition to image formats, the ABBYY FineReader Engine can now as well open and process the most common Office documents such as text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations:
• • Text documents: doc, docx, rtf, htm / html, txt, odt
  • Spreadsheets: xls, xlsx, ods
  • Presentations: ppt, pptx, odp

This new support of different types of input documents - scanned paper documents, different types of PDF, and digitally-born documents in Office formats - allows processing documents from multiple channels in a single flow.

Ability to extract information from MRZ in ID documents

• Machine-readable zones (MRZ) are used in ID documents to encode personal information. With the ability to extract information from the machine-readable zone, FineReader Engine can be used in ID verification systems that are often used by government organizations as well as in solutions for customer onboarding used by employees of hotels, car rental companies, banks or insurance firms who need to quickly enter and verify their clients' personal data.
• The personal information in machine-readable zone in ID documents is encoded as 2 or 3 lines of text according to specification of the ICAO Document 9303.

New OCR languages:

• Georgian OCR: The Georgian language was added as a new OCR language
• OCR for Simple Mathematical Formulas: ABBYY FineReader Engine now allows extracting characters of simple mathematical formulas. With the new OCR language Simple Mathematical Formulas it is possible to process scientific documents containing simple single-line mathematical formulas inside the text.

Enhanced OCR languages - with the support of Artificial Intelligence algorithms:

• The newly trained Convolutional Neural Network for recognition of Asian languages provides following improvements:
  • Significantly faster recognition of Korean
  • Faster recognition of Chinese
  • Increased speed & accuracy in recognition of Japanese (Modern)

• Extended set of tags on export to tagged PDF allows creating PDFs that are compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in the European Union and the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in the USA.
• Ability to save information about creation and editing dates during the export to PDF allows recording following information:
• • Date of creation
  • Date of modification
  • Both information (creation and modification dates)

• New article in product documentation describes how to deploy FineReader Engine in Docker containers.
• EULA file is available in FineReader Engine files

• The Cloud-based License was renamed into Online License. This type of license supports FineReader Engine's deployment in the Cloud. In addition, it allows using the FineReader Engine with Docker containers as well as deploying it within virtual environments. The Online License requires permanent internet connection. The licensing mechanism now supports proxy servers allowing to deploy FineReader Engine in systems with high security requirements, where the internet connection is allowed only via a proxy server.

• New code sample for MRZ data extraction
• Compatibility with latest Java releases allows to leverage modern development environments.
• Ability to detect the build number of FineReader Engine before loading a java wrapper allows to check compatibility with host applications