Normally, ABBYY will make a text area solely around text, while new paragraphs will sometimes be in different boxes. If the boxes are of the same type, you can just take one box and expand it to cover everything by clicking and dragging at the corners of a box.
Here is a screen shot of ABBYY's first-pass capture of segments of a page:
This screen shot shows the result of multiple text areas combined into one:
The default shape of an area is a rectangle, but sometimes parts of a document you wish to recognize cannot fit in a simple rectangle. Let’s say you want all the text to be in one text box, as in this screen shot of irregular text that is not easily capture by a rectangular text-area box:
Expanding as in the previous method will not work because of the irregular shape. If you click on the area you wish to expand, a floating toolbar will appear that looks like this image:
The two dashed boxes with the plus and minus sign are for creating and deleting areas in relation to the text box you clicked on. If you press on the dashed box with the plus sign, you can create a text box that can connect the disconnected ones.
Note: Merging areas that are arranged side-by-side would lead the text pane to output the text in one straight line, so if you want two separate columns, be sure to have two separate text areas.
Again, the zoom pane can be used for more precise adjustments of the areas. The same will work for picture areas.
For tables, however, there are different options that pop up when one clicks on the text-recognized area. Here is a screen shot of the ribbon toolbar that appears:
This ribbon menu will let you separate parts of the table into rows and columns, delete separators, and analyze the area created into a table so you don’t manually have to do it.
As you can see in this image, ABBYY did not recognize this page of the document as a table despite its table-like layout into rows and two columns:
Using the Table tool from the toolbar, we can create a table area, as in this image showing the blue text area drawn over the table area:
Because the table has not been separated into any columns or rows, we must do this manually using the pop-up toolbar.
Select the tool option showing a table with the wand in front. ABBYY will try to guess where the lines would be and will draw them within the blue table recognition area, as in this screen shot:
Now the software has placed columns and rows mostly where they should be. Still, there are a couple of mistakes. If you look in the zoom pane, ABBYY has created an extra row where there shouldn’t be.
In this case, you select from the pop-up toolbar the icon with the red X. Moving your cursor to the line you want deleted and click on it. This will delete the dividing line.
Dedicating time in ABBYY to adjusting the locations and number of recognition areas that the program attempts based on auto-detection pays off. It leads to much better results and less time spent in post-processing fixes to output.