IRIS Readiris Pro 11

It's been a little under a year since we reviewed Readiris Pro 10 and, on the outside at least, little has changed. It's the same interface as previous versions, although this is no bad thing. Select where you want your source document to come from (either a scanner via the TWAIN interface or from an image or PDF file), adjust the zones on the page, click Recognise and your document is reproduced in an editable format. Besides Microsoft Office, Readiris Pro 11 will also output to OpenOffice, HTML and PDF formats, as well as a variety of more obscure options.

Accuracy is paramount, and using a variety of test documents Readiris produced some impressive results. The old version claimed to be 99% accurate, and when recognising 300dpi documents with standard fonts, this even seems conservative: if you're scanning a page of plain text, you'll soon find little need to even bother spellchecking the job once it's finished processing.

It's still possible to trip up the software, particularly when it comes to handwriting recognition - the least functional part of the software. Write in perfectly straight, copperplate handwriting and you'll get respectable results, but don't expect hasty, handwritten notes to be reproduced as anything other than jumbled garbage. When it comes to printed documents, the more complicated the page is, the worse you can expect the results to be, at least in fully automatic mode. Another niggle is that the scroll wheel on a mouse doesn't work within the software, and that the contents of the document aren't shown while you drag the scrollbars around. It's not a major irritation at first, but if you have 30 pages to set up, every shortcut counts; it gives Readiris 11 a slightly counter-intuitive feel.

Version 11 contains a number of small updates: the interface has been brought slightly up-to-date, and seven languages have been added to the already exhaustive list. However, there's no upgrade pricing at all, so if you have version 10 there's little reason to buy this. But for OCR newcomers, Readiris is the best at this price, and offers all a home office could want.

Author: Dave Stevenson