ABBYY Releases FineReader Engine 12.8.0 that Exports to DocLang for AI-Ready Documents

On the heels of the announcement by the Linux AI and Data Foundation about the new DocLang artificial intelligence-native document standard founded by ABBYY, IBM, HumanSignal, Nvidia, and RedHat, ABBYY today released ABBYY FineReader Engine 12.8.0 that exports to DocLang.
DocLang is an open, AI-native document standard designed specifically for machines and Large Language Models (LLMs), rather than human readers. Because formats like PDFs and Word documents were built to look good to humans, AI often struggles to extract their layout, reading order, and tables. DocLang bridges this gap by acting like “JSON for documents”
ABBYY FineReader Engine with DocLang
ABBYY FineReader Engine with DocLang support provides developers a unified, AI-readable format to represent documents for LLM and agentic AI consumption, saving them time and increasing document processing performance.
FineReader Engine with DocLang Improves Document Processing Performance
ABBYY recently demonstrated FineReader Engine processing unprecedented speeds of 2,160,000 pages per hour at its ABBYY Ascend event. Additionally, in a side-by-side benchmark, ABBYY compared the processing of a PDF and DocLang document. In the controlled experiment, the same document for the same complex task using the same AI model was configured identically. The only variable was the document representation in PDF and DocLang. FineReader Engine with DocLang significantly improved output quality, increased structural accuracy, decreased token usage, and reduced latency.
See the ABBYY interactive benchmark at www.abbyy.com/ai/doclang/.
The controlled benchmark tested three types of enterprise documents: an annual report, a clinical study, and a vendor contract. These documents, designed for human interpretation yet complex for machines to process, demonstrated successful results during testing.
“ABBYY FineReader Engine is already used by thousands of organizations processing billions of documents every year,” commented Max Vermeir, vice president of AI Strategy at ABBYY. “Now with DocLang as an AI native format, more companies will be able to accelerate innovation and have faster access to their business data to make smarter, more impactful decisions.”
Why the DocLang Standard is Needed
ABBYY, IBM, HumanSignal, Nvidia and Red Hat, formed the DocLang working group to revolutionize AI document parsing. Current document formats such as PDF, HTML, Markdown, and others, were designed for human consumption rather than for AI interpretation. The result is a patchwork of partial solutions requiring custom parsing at every integration point that burdens developers with building custom parsers, is prone to hallucinations, and complicates regulatory compliance.
DocLang is said to create a reliable abstraction layer between unstructured data and intelligent AI systems. It standardizes the various digital document formats that enterprises operate on and gives AI systems the structure they need to perform reliably at enterprise scale.
ABBYY’s Vermeir continued, “DocLang is specifically engineered to address industry challenges with a minimal, standardized, and AI-native method for representing document structure, meaning, layout, and governance. FineReader Engine with DocLang support was designed for efficient machine processing and a predictable structure optimized for modern AI tokenization and modeling techniques. Organizations will see a significant difference with more reliable interpretation, increased accuracy, and lower computational costs.”
More information about the DocLang working group can be found here.
More information about ABBYY FineReader Engine can be found here.
More information about the FineReader Engine 12.8 release with DocLang can be found here.
More Resources
- June 2026: ABBYY and Partners Focus on New DocLang Standard to Make Documents AI-Ready
- January 2026: ABBYY Launches Next-Gen AI-Assisted Intelligent Document Processing Platform
- July 2025: ABBYY Launches New AI-Based Document-Process Solutions
- May 2025: ABBYY Launches New AI-Based Solution for Developing Automated Document Workflows

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