ABBYY ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF ABBYY
FINE READER SPRINT FOR MACINTOSH

Now scanner manufacturers can bundle the world's leading OCR-system ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Sprint for both PC and Macintosh platforms.

Las Vegas, COMDEX, November 15, 1999 ù ABBYY Software House (www.abbyy.com) announces the launch of the first ABBYY product for the Macintosh (Mac) platform û an optical character recognition (OCR) system called ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Sprint for Mac. 

FineReader 4.0 Sprint for Mac will be bundled worldwide with scanners from Acer and others. It allows users to easily recognize scanned documents with text, pictures and tables in one of 53 languages. FineReader Sprint for Mac features one-button OCR (ôScan&Readö) to scan a document, recognize the text, tables and pictures, retain the formatting of the original page, and save the recognition results in RTF or TXT formats. 

According to recent marketing reports, almost 7% of scanners sold worldwide are used with Macintosh systems. Due to the popularity of USB, scanner manufacturers and stores are moving toward a PC/Mac USB combination package, which includes one USB scanner and two sets of software -- for PC and Mac platforms. Scanner manufacturers can now include the world's leading FineReader 4.0 Sprint OCR system for their PC and Mac users.

"ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Standard and Professional have won numerous Editor's Choice awards from international magazines," said Sergey Andreyev, CEO of ABBYY Software House. "We used the same technology to develop FineReader 4.0 Sprint for Mac, giving our users the highest level of accuracy and ease of use."

ABBYY USA is a member of the ABBYY Group, which publishes and distributes ABBYYÆs products in North America. ABBYY (ABBYY Software House) specializes in the development of software for optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics, and electronic lexicography. ABBYY's products include: the FineReader line of OCR/ICR/OMR software, which allows the automatic input of texts, tables and forms into a computer; FineReader Development Tools, which allows developers to integrate OCR into their solutions and more... Companies that license ABBYY OCR/ICR technologies include Siemens Nixdorf, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, L&H/Kurzweil, Banctec (Japan), Visionshape, Jet Fax, NewSoft, and Primax. For more information about ABBYY, visit web-site at www.abbyy.com.

Contacts: 

Nastasya Savina
Head of Information, 
PR and Advertisement Service
ABBYY Software House
+7 095 234-4400 (Tel)
+7 095 263-6278 (Fax)
Nastasya@abbyy.ru

Ding Tang 
President
ABBYY USA 
510-226-6717 (Tel)
510-226-6069 (Fax)
dtang@abbyyusa.com