Transforming printed documents into editable text requires an optical character recognition program (OCR). The basic OCR applications that come with most flatbed and sheetfed scanners are adequate for basic tasks, but more complicated documents require a full-featured package like IRIS's Readiris Pro 10. With its easy interface and speedy OCR conversion, Readiris comes highly recommended to anyone who needs to convert documents to electronic form. But we'd advise new users to lower their expectations about transforming hand-printed notes into editable text - our results were less than impressive.

Pros: Quick; accurate; excellent PDF tools; supports tables and forms
Cons: No support for business card scanning


Readiris Pro 10 is available in two versions. The professional version reviewed here, as well as a Corporate edition (£225 ex. VAT). Readiris Pro addresses home and professional users whereas the Corporate version meets the needs of larger organisations, in particular those requiring high-volume scans. Whichever option you need, the software provides a good productivity booster by 'retyping' scanned documents and image files and converting PDF files in editable text, maintaining most of the original layout at a speedy rate and high level of accuracy.

Readiris Corporate 10 also supports batch separation in documents, document indexing based on barcode reading, XML index generation, optimised PDF generation with embedded JPEG 2000, and a new direct saving of scanned documents in JPEG 2000 and PDF format. It also supports duplex scanners, scans and recognises business cards, and includes a 'Watched Folder'. It's a real shame IRIS has implemented the business card scanning functionality into the Professional version, as this would be a real boon to small-business users.

Readiris Pro's interface has been updated to make it even easier to use. The new status window gives you information about your scanned documents (source, resolution, times, image processing, and so on) and better support for image formats means the software can read the most popular image formats, such as JPEG 2000 and DjVu files.

Another neat addition is hand-print recognition, a unique feature based on the company's ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) engine that not only reads and recognises typewritten text but also hand-printed capital letters, figures or symbols. So, for instance, scanned documents containing your own manual notes should be recognised. On a less positive side, hand-printing recognition is limited to numerals, uppercase and separated letters (AZ) and some punctuation symbols (comma, dot and hyphen).

1 2 »