ABBYY OCR technology uses language information and dictionaries to achieve high recognition quality during the process of optical character recognition. Real documents can contain multiple languages on one page or the document stream contains a large number of different languages, e.g.

• a publication that has the same content in two or more languages in different columns, for example airline magazines
  or
• documents from the European Union can contain up to 25 or more different languages. The same applies for internal business documents of a globally acting enterprise.

• Even up to the ABBYY technology cycle V10 the OCR engine is able to process multiple languages documents.
• The technology selected the best matching language from a group pre-defined group of languages, this group can/has to be set/edited by the user/developer.

• It is/was recommended to use max. 5 different languages in a group. The more languages were selected the higher the number of internal OCR hypothesis. This could negativelly impactthe OCR quality as welll as the processing time.

• If the language input is very mixed and consist of many different languages, then manual pre-sorting is often not an option. Instead multiple OCR runs with different language settings have to be made. Based on the internal recognition statistics, the system had to decide what combination delivered the best results.

FineReader Engine 11 is the first SDK where a new language detection is implemented, it is part of the “FRDocument Object”

• The recognition language of a document can be automatically detected, but the developer has to specify at least 3 languages that might show up in the document.
• The recognition language is detected for each word in the text.

The API contains several different objects within the FRDocument object: