Product Reviews

To convert a printed document into an editable format, you need optical character recognition (OCR) software. This software recognises the characters that make up the printed page and turns the whole thing into an editable digital file.

Most scanners come with a basic OCR package, but these are often slow and don't offer the range of features you can get with a professional package such as ReadIRIS Pro 10. Belgian firm IRIS has been in the OCR business for years; you may well have got one of its earlier or 'lite' products bundled with your scanner.

ReadIRIS Pro 10 is the company's most recent OCR package and has all the finesse you would expect from a company with this much experience. IRIS claims that the software is easy to use and fast in action, and it is true to its word. Even on complex, multipage documents it speeds through the OCR process. It's much faster than other OCR products we've seen.

Despite its wide range of features and sophisticated capabilities, this program is very user-friendly. For OCR novices there is a wizard that makes the whole

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process simple. Just select from the options provided, and it does the whole job for you. If you're a more experienced user, there are plenty of ways to tweak the software in order to get it to do exactly what you want.

The user interface has been updated and given an Office 2003-style feel. The range of files it recognises has also been increased to include JPEG 2000 and DejaVu files. It can also output to the XML-based Microsoft Office format, WordML. It includes tools for business card and barcode recognition, which are handy in a business environment. It also offers good PDF support, with four types of PDF output available.

The main new feature is the much-vaunted handprint recognition, which aims to turn handwritten notes into text. This is a great idea, as we would all love to be able to input our notes into a computer and have them converted to text. Sadly, the vagaries of the human hand left the software stumped. For starters, you have to write in a very unnatural way to give the program any chance of recognising your scribblings. It can't handle joined-up writing or lower-case letters, only separated block capitals. Even then, the program has trouble recognising handwritten text with any accuracy. It's a shame this feature doesn't live up to the hype, but the task of turning human handwriting into digital text is a complex one as people don't tend to write the same letters the same way every time.

ReadIRIS Pro 10 is an impressive program, though, and if you need to use OCR for your business the price isn't unreasonable. However, home users will probably find that the extras such as barcode scanning and WordML support are unnecessary