Case Study: C Technologies AB achieves compact, 53‑language high‑accuracy OCR in the C‑Pen with ABBYY FineReader

C Technologies Uses ABBYY Products in Its C-Pen Reading Pen

C Technologies, a Swedish high‑tech company, developed the C‑Pen — a 100 g handheld reading pen powered by an Intel StrongARM processor that scans and stores text and functions as a portable dictionary. The team faced a major engineering challenge: the device allowed only about 2 MB for OCR code and 4 MB for dictionaries, while standard OCR software was far larger, blocking further application development.

To solve this, C Technologies partnered with ABBYY to integrate a highly optimized version of FineReader and the ABBYY Lingvo dictionary into the C‑Pen without sacrificing accuracy. The result is a compact OCR engine supporting 53 languages and Lingvo dictionaries (≈62,000 English‑Russian and >50,000 Russian‑English entries), with desktop‑grade accuracy, ROM footprint around 1.5 MB and RAM use down to 0.5–1 MB — delivering world‑class recognition and dictionary features in a tiny portable device.

C Technologies AB

Mats Lindoff

President and CEO