# ABBYY FineReader PDF: What Its OCR Editor Does

- Author: Schema Law (https://www.schemalaw.com/)
- Published: 2025-12-10T13:42:03Z
- Updated: 2026-10-11T19:22:20Z
- Category: OCR in everyday software
- Canonical: https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/abbyy-finereader-pdf

> ABBYY FineReader PDF explained from ABBYY's user guide: the editions, the OCR Editor, recognition areas, Hot Folder batch runs and the output formats.

ABBYY FineReader PDF is desktop software that combines a PDF editor with an OCR program. Its OCR Editor converts scans, PDFs and photos into editable formats, and lets you mark which parts of a page are text, tables or pictures before it reads them. A companion tool, Hot Folder, runs the same conversion on a schedule.

This post describes the product using ABBYY's own [user guide for FineReader PDF 16](https://help.abbyy.com/assets/en-us/finereader/16/Users_Guide.pdf) and its pricing page, and nothing else. It does not rate how well FineReader reads a page, and it does not compare its results with any other product. If you are deciding whether FineReader fits your office, the aim here is that you know what the parts are called and what ABBYY says each one does.

## What is ABBYY FineReader PDF?

ABBYY FineReader PDF is an installed program for working with PDFs and for converting scanned documents. ABBYY's guide calls it a universal PDF tool for managing documents, and its [pricing page](https://pdf.abbyy.com/pricing/) lists three editions: Standard for Windows, Corporate for Windows, and FineReader PDF for Mac.

The introduction to the [FineReader PDF 16 user guide](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/16/user_guide/overview/) groups what the Windows program does under a few headings:

- **Work with PDFs,** scanned ones included: edit text, search, rearrange pages, comment, add watermarks, headers, footers, Bates numbering and stamps, sign, password-protect, and redact.
- **Scan and convert:** turn paper and PDFs into editable and searchable formats, among them Word, Excel, searchable PDF, PDF/A and PDF/UA.
- **Compare** two versions of a document, even in different formats.
- **Automate** conversion with Hot Folder.
- **Capture** part of the screen with Screenshot Reader.

The guide marks comparison and Hot Folder with a footnote: the feature is not available with all versions of FineReader. The pricing page shows where the line falls.

| Edition | How ABBYY describes it |
| --- | --- |
| FineReader PDF Standard (Windows) | A PDF application with OCR, for work with both digital and scanned documents |
| FineReader PDF Corporate (Windows) | Adds document comparison and automated conversion of up to 5,000 pages a month |
| FineReader PDF for Mac | An OCR application for macOS that converts PDFs, paper documents and images into searchable and editable documents |

A note under the Corporate plan says the monthly page limit applies only to automated processing with Hot Folder and resets every 30 days. The page's question on upgrading describes moving from Standard to Corporate "to get Compare Documents and Hot Folder features". On the Mac edition, ABBYY's answer is that it has the same OCR capabilities but a limited PDF feature set.

Two more facts from the pricing page matter to a firm. FineReader is sold by subscription, and ABBYY lists several licence types for Windows: Standalone, Per Seat, Remote User, Concurrent and Site. For Mac it lists Per Seat only.

The rest of this post describes the Windows program, because that is what the user guide documents.

## How does the FineReader OCR Editor differ from its PDF editor?

The PDF Editor is for reading and changing a PDF as a PDF. The OCR Editor is for converting a scan into another format with control over how the page is read. ABBYY's guide says that in the OCR Editor you can draw recognition areas, check recognized text and train the program on unusual characters and fonts.

Both workspaces use recognition, in different ways.

### Recognition in the PDF Editor

The guide describes a process called background recognition. When you open a scanned PDF in the PDF Editor, OCR runs by itself so you can search and copy text. ABBYY is specific about what this does to the file: the background process does not change the contents of the PDF. It adds a temporary text layer that will not be available when the document is opened in other applications.

To keep the text, you use the Recognize Document command, which adds a permanent text layer. The guide's section on types of PDF documents explains the result: a searchable PDF consists of the page images with an invisible text layer underneath.

That difference catches people out. A scan that searches perfectly well inside FineReader may still be an image-only file when you email it to a colleague. Run Recognize Document and save before you send it.

### Recognition in the OCR Editor

The guide's [OCR Editor chapter](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/16/user_guide/workwithocr/) introduces the workspace, and its page on the OCR Editor interface describes a window with four panes:

| Pane | What it shows |
| --- | --- |
| Pages | Every page in the current OCR project |
| Image | The page picture, where you edit recognition areas |
| Text | The recognized text, where you check spelling and edit |
| Zoom | An enlarged view of the line you are working on |

Work in the OCR Editor is held in an OCR project. The guide says a project contains the source images, the recognized text, your program settings and any user patterns or languages you created. You can save it and pick up where you left off.

The guide also describes a Verification dialog for reviewing words that contain low-confidence characters. You can skip a word, replace it with a suggestion, or add it to the dictionary.

### Moving between the two

From the PDF Editor, the guide lists a command named Recognize and Verify in OCR Editor. It suggests this route when you want to check the recognized text or train the program on non-standard fonts.

A rule of thumb for legal work: if the document must stay a PDF and look as it does now, such as a signed agreement or a filed order, stay in the PDF Editor and add a text layer. If you need the words in Word or the figures in Excel, go to the OCR Editor.

On a converted contract, look through the Word file for the obligation clause, the invoice total, and the exhibit label in the footer. Set each hit beside the pleading page it came from. Correct a figure or a section number that fails to match the scan before anyone redlines from that conversion.

## Recognition areas in FineReader: text, table and picture

Before FineReader reads a page it divides the page into areas. The guide says the program detects text, picture, background picture, table and barcode areas, and that this analysis decides which parts are recognized and in what order. You can redraw any area the program got wrong.

The guide's glossary defines the types:

| Area type | ABBYY's definition, in short |
| --- | --- |
| Text area | Contains text; should hold single-column text only |
| Table area | Contains data in tabular form; the program draws separators inside it to form a table |
| Picture area | Contains a picture, or anything else that should be shown as a picture, such as a fragment of text |
| Background picture area | Contains a picture with text printed over it |
| Barcode area | Contains a barcode |
| Recognition area | An area the program should analyze automatically |

In the Image pane the types are told apart by the color of their borders.

### What you can do with areas

The guide lists the tools: create an area, adjust its borders, add or remove parts of it, move it, reorder areas, delete them, and change the direction of the text inside. You can also right-click an area and change its type. Each area has properties you can edit, among them its language and, for a text area, its function, such as header, footer or footnote.

Two instructions in the guide are easy to miss:

- After you move an area or change its type, recognize the image again. The text does not update until you do.
- Deleting an area from a page that has already been recognized also deletes that area's text from the Text pane.

### Why this matters on a legal page

Think of a page from a commercial lease with a rent schedule in the middle and a signature block at the foot.

- If the schedule is detected as a text area, its columns may run together into lines of prose. Drawing a table area around it, then choosing Analyze Table Structure as the guide describes, tells the program to treat it as rows and columns.
- A signature or a court stamp is not text. Marking it as a picture area keeps it as an image instead of a string of stray characters.
- Two-column pages, such as an appellate opinion, depend on reading order. The guide's reorder tool lets you set the order in which areas appear in the output.

For a stack of identical forms the guide describes area templates, which store the size and position of areas so you can apply them to similar pages.

This is hands-on work, a page at a time. It suits a 30-page exhibit that has to convert cleanly. It does not suit 8,000 pages of production. Hot Folder is the part of FineReader meant for volume.

## What does the FineReader Hot Folder automate?

Hot Folder automates recognition for a whole folder. ABBYY's [Hot Folder page](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/16/user_guide/hotfolder/) calls it a scheduling agent: you choose a folder of images, set the opening, OCR and saving options, and FineReader processes what it finds there, for example overnight.

The guide heads the chapter with a note that Hot Folder is not available in some versions of FineReader. The pricing page ties it to the Corporate edition and its monthly allowance of 5,000 pages.

### What a task contains

A Hot Folder task has four parts in the guide:

1. **A schedule.** Run once at a set time, or recurring: every minute, once a day, once a week or once a month.
2. **A source.** A local or network folder, a folder on an FTP server, a mailbox in Outlook, or an existing OCR project. You also say whether the original files are kept, deleted or moved.
3. **Recognition settings.** The document language, whether areas are detected automatically or taken from an area template, and whether blank pages are deleted.
4. **Saving settings.** The output format, the destination folder, the file name, and whether to create one document per file, one per folder, or one for everything. A task can have several saving steps, so the same input can produce more than one format.

### The conditions ABBYY states

The guide repeats one condition twice: for tasks to start, your computer must be turned on and you must be logged on. Hot Folder is a desktop scheduler, so it runs on the PC where it is set up, under your account.

Hot Folder can also keep a log for each task. The guide says the log holds the task's name and settings, any errors and warnings, and statistics: the number of pages processed, the number of errors and warnings, and the number of uncertain characters. It is saved as a text file alongside the output.

### A worked example

A three-lawyer practice, Hartwell & Osei, scans incoming mail on the office copier each afternoon. The copier saves image-only PDFs to a network folder named `Scans_Inbox`.

- The office manager creates a Hot Folder task with `Scans_Inbox` as the source and sets it to run once a day at 7:00 p.m.
- She sets the language to English and the output to searchable PDF, one document per file, saved to `Scans_Searchable`.
- She chooses to keep the original files, so the scans stay as they arrived.
- She leaves her PC on and stays logged on overnight, because the task will not start otherwise.
- Each morning she opens the log and looks at the error count before anyone files the PDFs.

At roughly 150 pages a day the firm would use about 3,300 pages over 22 working days, inside the 5,000-page allowance ABBYY states. A firm scanning 400 pages a day would pass it within three weeks.

Keeping the originals is a deliberate choice. A task set to delete source files leaves you with only the processed version. For anything that might be evidence, keep what you received.

## Which formats can FineReader save recognized pages to?

FineReader saves recognized pages to PDF, to editable formats such as Word, RTF, ODT and PowerPoint, to Excel and CSV for tables, and to plain text, HTML, e-book formats and images. The format table in ABBYY's guide lists each one with its file extension.

From that table, the saving formats are:

| Kind | Formats listed |
| --- | --- |
| PDF | PDF, either searchable or image-only |
| Word processing | DOC and DOCX, RTF, ODT |
| Spreadsheets and data | XLS and XLSX, CSV |
| Presentation | PPTX |
| Text and web | TXT, HTML |
| E-book | EPUB, FB2 |
| Other | DjVu |
| Images | JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, TIFF, BMP, JBIG2, PCX |

### Saving modes

Format is one choice. Layout is another. The guide describes five saving modes for editable output:

- **Exact copy:** formatting corresponds to the original. ABBYY notes that this limits your ability to change the text and format afterwards.
- **Editable copy:** formatting may differ slightly from the original, and the document is easy to edit.
- **Formatted text:** keeps fonts, font sizes and paragraphs, without the exact spacing or position of objects on the page.
- **Plain text:** no formatting.
- **Flexible layout:** an HTML document with objects placed as close to the original as is technically possible.

For a contract you will redline, Editable copy is the natural starting point. For an exhibit that has to look like the paper, Exact copy is closer, at the cost of awkward editing. The general trade between looks and editability is covered in the post on [whether OCR keeps formatting](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/does-ocr-keep-formatting).

### Two kinds of PDF

When you save to PDF, the guide offers Searchable PDF Document, which lets users select and copy the content, and Image-Only PDF Document, which does not. Within searchable PDF, the guide's reference section describes an option for text under the page image, which keeps the scan visible, and one for text and pictures only, which it says is easier to edit but may be visually different from the original. Choose the first when the copy has to look like the scan. The guide also covers saving in PDF/A, which the post on [what PDF/A is](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/what-is-pdf-a) explains.

## Finding an answer in the ABBYY FineReader user guide

ABBYY publishes the user guide online and as a PDF. The version 16 guide starts at its [introduction page](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/16/user_guide/overview/), and the whole guide is available as one downloadable PDF from the same site. The version 15 guide sits at the same address with 15 in place of 16.

That matters if your office still runs FineReader PDF 15 for Windows. Use the guide that matches your version: the [FineReader PDF 15 introduction](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/15/user_guide/overview/) and its [Hot Folder page](https://help.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/15/user_guide/hotfolder/) are both online. The version 16 guide opens with a list of what changed, including a redesigned ribbon-style interface, so button positions in the two guides will not always match.

The PDF edition of the version 16 guide runs to more than 500 pages. These are the chapters a legal user is most likely to want:

| If you want to | Look in |
| --- | --- |
| Make one scanned PDF searchable | PDF Editor, "Recognizing text" |
| Understand why search works in FineReader but not elsewhere | PDF Editor, "Background recognition" |
| Fix a table that converted as prose | OCR Editor, "If tables and pictures are not detected" |
| Fix reading order or wrongly detected blocks | OCR Editor, "If areas are detected incorrectly" |
| Review doubtful words | OCR Editor, "Checking recognized text" |
| Set up overnight batch OCR | "Automating and scheduling OCR", "ABBYY Hot Folder" |
| See every input and output format | Reference, "Supported document formats" |
| Choose scanner settings | Reference, "Scanning tips" |
| Look up a term | Appendix, "Glossary" |

Three habits make the guide quicker to use:

1. **Search the PDF edition.** One file is easier to search than a website of separate pages.
2. **Use ABBYY's words.** Search for "area", "text layer" or "OCR project", the terms the guide itself uses.
3. **Check the footnotes.** Features limited to some editions are marked in the text, as Hot Folder and Automated Tasks are.

Where the guide stops, the decision about fit begins. FineReader is installed software: it runs on your PC, and someone has to install it and manage the licences. The post on [online OCR versus desktop OCR for law firms](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/online-ocr-vs-desktop-ocr-for-law-firms) sets out that trade. If you are weighing a move away from it, read the post on [choosing an ABBYY FineReader alternative](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/abbyy-finereader-alternative), which lists what you would give up. For a comparable desktop editor from another maker, see the post on [what Kofax Power PDF's OCR does](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/kofax-power-pdf-ocr).

A browser service is a different kind of tool. Schema Law, for instance, has no area editor and no scheduler: you upload a PDF, PNG or JPEG, it reads the pages into text and tables, and you export. Its plans are priced by pages a month, as the [pricing page](https://www.schemalaw.com/pricing) shows. Whichever you use, read names, dates and amounts against the page image before you rely on the output.

## Try it on a real document

Upload a scanned PDF and export it as Word, a searchable PDF or plain text on the free plan. Your documents are never used to train an AI model. [Start free](https://www.schemalaw.com/api/auth/google)