Graphical invites are one of the minor irritations of life as a technie journalist (indeed, I guess, anyone who gets these things by email). PR companies like to project themselves as being smart and trendy, and plain vanilla email text is, well... so common. So they hire a designer at vast expense to send out a beautiful design with all the details of the time and venue of some launch event.

The trouble is that plain vanilla text is preferable because you can simply paste it into your calendar. If the information is in a graphical format you have to type it all over again. This is not so hard if you have twin screens; otherwise you have to contrive to get the image in view on the same screen as your calendar.

Abbyy has just launched a product called FotoReader, which comes with with a utility that in theory gets round this. It will turn screen images of text into text files.

The main purpose of the software it to translate digital camera images of text, enabling you to use your camera as a portable scanner. The feature has be part of some optical-character-recognition (OCR) packages for some time but Fotoreader is sold as a £39.99 standlone.

The difference between OCR-ing a scanned image and a camera shot is that the latter tends to introduce distortion according to where the picture was taken from. The Abbyy utlity allows for this.  

From the bumff we have on the software, the utility does lack one desirable feature, which was the star act of HP's excellent Capshare handheld scanner of around a decade ago: it stitched scanned images together.

You would be hard put to take a single camera image of a broadsheet news page that was not heavily distorted, or taken from so far away as to be unsuitable for OCR. With the HP software you could take two or three scans and stitch them together at the click of a button.

Still, FotoReader sounds interesting and we will be reviewing it soon.