Ability to remove garbage from color images

Ability to inject a text layer into selected pages of a PDF document

Extended method of injecting text into PDF

Extension of method for detecting text layer in PDFs

Ability to rasterize FreeText annotations

Export for multi-page PDFs documents with an undefined number of pages

Ability to adjust a time zone for PDF export

[Technical preview] Faster PDF printing when using MRC compression

Improved readability of exported XML data for users

Ability to exclude BOM during export to TXT

Updated documentation for working with screenshots

Upgrade from the Previous Versions and Releases

Binary Incompatibility

It is necessary to recompile host application regardless a version of Engine previously used.

API Changes

There are no API Changes.

Changes in Release 8 Update

IENGINE::INJECTTEXTLAYER METHOD IS MARKED AS DEPRECATED

IEngine::InjectTextLayer is deprecated and will be removed in the next major release. IEngine::InjectTextLayerEx method must be used instead.

Please find more information on ‘Large document conversion to searchable PDFs improvement’.

SOME METHODS, OBJECTS AND INTERFACES RELATED TO ONE-PAGE DOCUMENT PROCESSING ARE MARKED AS DEPRECATED

The following methods are marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next major release:

Methods:

• IEngine::ProcessPage
• IEngine::ProcessPagesEx
• IEngine::ExportPage
• IEngine::ExportPagesEx
• IEngine::SynthesizePagesEx
• IEngine::OpenImageFile
• IEngine::PrepareImageFile
• IEngine::CreateLayout
• Objects:
• DocumentAnalyzer
• DocumentInfo
• Exporter

Interfaces:

• IDocumentAnalyzerEvents
• IRecognizedPages
• IExporterEvents

One-page document processing may be done by using properties and methods of Engine, FRPage and FRDocument objects as following:

TEXTORIENTATION::ISVERTICALLYMIRRORED PROPERTY IS MARKED AS DEPRECATED

TextOrientation::IsVerticallyMirrored property is marked as deprecated and will be removed in future versions. The cause is that no scenarios when the detection of vertically mirrored orientation is necessary have been found.

ADDED IPDFMRCPARAMS:: USEMULTIPLEMASKS

New property for faster PDF files with MRC was added to FRE. Please, find more information on ‘New option for faster printing of PDF using MRC’.

ADDED IPREPAREIMAGEMODE:: RASTERIZEFREETEXT

A new method for rasterizing FreeText annotations was added. Find detailed information on ‘An opportunity to rasterize FreeText annotations’.

ADDED INTERFACE AND METHOD FOR TUNING NEW INJECTTEXTLAYEREX2 METHOD

ITextLayerInjectionParams interface and CreateTextLayerInjectionParams method was added. Please, find the detailed information on ‘Orientation and skew correction on text injection’.

INSERTTAB METHOD OF THE PARAGRAPH OBJECT WAS ADDED

New method inserts the tabulation symbol into chosen text position.

ITABPOSITIONS::ADDNEW IS MARKED AS DEPRECATED AND ITABPOSITIONS::ADDNEWEX METHOD WAS ADDED

The ITabPositions::AddNew method was not implemented and now it returns E_NOTIMPL code.

To replace this method, ITabPositions::AddNewEx was added.

Changes in behavior

AN ABILITY TO SAVE LICENSE COUNTERS VALUE ON LICENSE DEACTIVATION

A new section 'ZeroLevel' was added into License Wizard for FRE 11 Mac. The only one available option in this section is ZeroLevel.

If this option is activated, a license counter value will be saved in ABBYY Registration Server during the license deactivation. On further activation counter will take value from ABBYY Registration Server.

New Features and Improvements

Release 8 Update

CONVERSION DOCUMENTS TO SEARCHABLE PDFS AT FULL THROTTLE REQUIRES NO PAGE NUMBERS SETUP ANY MORE

It is possible to convert documents containing undefined number of pages to searchable PDF using ExportFileWriter. The PagesCount parameter must be set to -1 in this case (this parameter is deprecated and will be removed in future versions).

From now, our customers have no necessity to know an amount of pages in the document at the moment of creating a session of recognition.

It can be useful for effective work with scanners when one has to process a lot of pages and doesn’t know the amount of them in the document until the end of scanning, but needs the processing to start before the scanning will be finished.

Garbage removal from color images

New method ImageDocument::RemoveGarbageEx works with both color and white-and-black images. From now it is possible to remove garbage from color images using this method.

Input image	Output image

Dealing with black-and-white images the method works the same way as ImageDocument::RemoveGarbage which will be removed in future versions of FRE.

POSSIBILITY TO INJECT TEXT LAYER TO SELECTED PAGES OF PDF DOCUMENTS 

A new method IEngine::InjectTextLayerEx allows to process specific pages in the "image only" or "image on text" PDF documents. It creates a searchable PDF file which contains the same page images and the invisible text layer created from the recognized text of the document.

This new method works the same way as IEngine::InjectTextLayer and has new arguments:

• PageIndices. This parameter refers to the IntsCollection object which specifies the indices of the document pages, to which the text will be injected. This parameter is optional and may be 0, in which case the text will be injected to all the pages of the document.
• ProcessingEvents. Refers to the interface of the user-implemented object that is used for reporting events to the listeners. This parameter may be 0, in which case no callback will be attached.

The IEngine::InjectTextLayer method is now deprecated and will be removed in future versions.

ABILITY TO ADJUST A TIME ZONE FOR PDF EXPORT

New export parameter ReferenceTimeZone of IDPFExportFeatures interface allows our customers to adjust a time zone that will be used for the creation and modification date of the exporting documents.

Earlier FREngine have always wrote modification and creation date using UTC format. It was a problem for one of our customers. Several Adobe products (e.g. Adobe Reader) display creation/modification date of the document without using an information about user’s time zone.

To fix this situation the new options were added. ReferenceTimeZone has 3 values: TZT_UTC, TZT_Local and TZT_Daylight values for UTC time, local time and local time considering wintertime respectively. The default value of the parameter is TZT_UTC.

A NEW ARTICLE ABOUT WORKING WITH SCREENSHOTS IN DOCUMENTATION

An article ‘I am working with the screenshot image. Are there any special recommendations for screenshot processing?’ about suitable settings of FRE for screenshot processing was added. It is in the FAQ section.

ORIENTATION AND SKEW CORRECTION ON TEXT INJECTION

All settings in the PrepareImageMode and PageProcessingParams opject such as CorrectSkew and CorrecrOrientation work when passed to InjectTextLayer method.

Sometimes customers have PDFs that contain a mixture of digitally published files and scans. Pages that are digitally published do not need any correction, but scans may need it.

From FRE 11 R8, the new InjectTextLayerEx2 method is available. This method works the same as InjectTextLayerEx, but it additionally can correct orientation and skew of input images.

New TextLayerInjectionParams object allows to tune the parameters of processing the input "image only" or "image on text" PDF files and creation of a searchable PDF file using InjectTextLayerEx2 method.

AN OPPORTUNITY TO CHECK PDF FILES THAT PLACED IN MEMORY FOR TEXT LAYER

Sometimes it is necessary to work with InputStream for working with the files.

Previous versions of FRE 11 has only method IsPdfWithTextualContent for checking PDFs for text layer that required a string for FileName. As the customer works with InputStream it is necessary to pass a byte array as the first parameter for the method. In order to be able to check the files earlier they wrote the stream first in a temp file, but it is not acceptable for them since it would have performance impact.

A new method IsPdfWithTextualContentFromStream accepts reference to a read stream which contains the PDF file in which to detect the text layer.

AN OPPORTUNITY NOT TO WRITE BOM ON EXPORT TO TXT

FRE 11 always wrote Byte Order Mark (BOM) in case of export to TXT.

UTF-8 permits the BOM, but does not require or recommend its use. Byte order has no meaning in UTF-8 and is used only to signal at the start that the text stream is encoded in UTF-8.

Java's UTF-8 encoding has a known behavior and does not recognize this character as a BOM; the result of reading such a stream is a set of characters beginning with FEFF.

So, there are scenarios when clients may need not to write BOM in case of export to TXT. New export option WriteBomCharacter that solves this problem is available since FRE 11 R8.

HUMAN-READABLE NAMES OF PARAGRAPH STYLE ON EXPORT TO XML

Default values of names of paragraph styles were modified and now they can be easier read by a human. Now the names are formed basing on a role of the paragraph and modifications, applied to the style. Earlier GUID was used for naming the styles and it was not informative.

Users also have an opportunity to set paragraph style name manually using IParagraphStyle::Name method.

ADDED ‘NOT ENOUGH DISK SPACE’ ERROR CODE

A new error message ‘Not enough disk space’ for cases when there is not enough space on the disk was added.

NEW OPTION FOR FASTER PRINTING OF PDF USING MRC

Some our customers complained on too slow printing of PDFs with Mixed Raster Content.

FRE 11 R8 has new option UseMultipleMasks of IPDFMRCParams for tuning MRC parameters. This option activates a special mode in which different monochrome masks are used instead of one multicolor. This leads to faster document printing.

This mode allows to create only documents with monochrome characters. E.g. it is not possible to create documents with characters with a gradient filling using the new option.

The feature is implemented as technical preview and has not been tested for wide use. So, usage of new mode can cause some issues.

Performance results

This section contains performance results of the release comparing to the previous releases. The processor of the testing machine is Intel® Core™ i5-3450 CPU (3.10GHz, 4 physical cores) with 8GB of RAM.

English

Japanese

Korean

Chinese PRC

Chinese Taiwan

Arabic

Fixed Bugs

This section contains a list of bugs reported by customers that have been fixed.

Four-point scale will help you to evaluate the severity of each issue, enabling you to make informed decision on how important updates are for your system.

The following table contains bugs fixed in this release sorted in descending order of severity. If the bugs have workarounds, root causes or side effects, they will be mentioned in the Description section.

Known Issues and Workarounds

Mac OS version limitations

The following functionality of FineReader Engine 11 for Windows is not available in the Mac OS version:

• DjVu opening
• Scanning
• ICR/OMR
• Visual Components and other GUI elements
• WDP/WIC/BITMAP input formats and other Windows-specific functionality
• PDF text layer reusing
• Attachments extraction from PDF
• Bookmarks extraction from PDF
• Metadata extraction from PDF (the information about author, keywords, subject and title)

Java wrapper is not included into the distribution

Though we have partly functional Java wrapper for the Engine it still misses some important parts.

In some cases current version of the wrapper is enough, so please consult with HQ product analyst in case of urgent need.

Some API is not implemented

The following API is not implemented in FRE 10 and FRE 11:

• IFootnoteSeries::HasSeparator. Always returns “true”.
• ITextPicture::ColumnNumber. Always returns “0”.
• ICharParams::IsWordStart. Always returns “false”. It is true only for character parameters got through IWordRecognitionVariants interface.
• IIncut::TextWrapping. Always returns “TW_Undefined”.
• IRunningTitlesSeriesText::HasSeparator. Always returns “false”.

The implementation is not planned.

Farsi language is based on Arabic language

Farsi OCR output indicates Language ID as Arabic (CharParams::LanguageId = LI_ArabicSaudiArabia). This is because Farsi technology preview is based on Arabic OCR language.

The fix will be available in FRE 12.

IPDFMRCParams::MonochromeText doesn’t work correctly

Different algorithms of compressions during export to PDF are used with IPDFMRCParams::MonochromeText set to FALSE or DEFAULT whereas default value is FALSE.

Language auto detection uses CJK resources though none is selected for OCR

‘Cjk.*’ resource files are used while RecognizerParams::LanguageDetectionMode = TSPV_Yes even though recognition languages set does not include any of CJK languages.

The fix will be available in the FRE 11 R7. The proxy feature description is missing in the documentation

30% slowdown in all scenarios

Internal tests shows that this release got 30% slowdown comparing to R2.

We are investigating the reason and working on a patch.

AddImageFileFromMemory does not open PDF files

An attempt to open a PDF file from a memory ends up with the error ‘The image file you specify is empty.’

R7 will include a fix.