Readiris Pro 8

While Iris claims the new edition of this optical character recognition software is up to 35 per cent more accurate than the previous version, improvements in recognition only really come into play if you deal regularly with highly complex page layouts. Show Readiris Pro 7 a scanned page of printed text and it will interpret the raw characters just as ably. Where Readiris Pro 8 truly excels is in processing documents that contain a mix of images, tables, text and font styles and sizes.

The wizard-based interface is designed to aid beginners but in reality hinders recognition of more complicated documents. The system will automatically figure out the correct orientation of scanned pages and is adept at correcting the smallest skew, but its attempts at following the flow of multi-column text are poor. Better results are achieved using the program's zoning tool to highlight areas requiring recognition manually - Readiris managed close to 100 per cent recognition accuracy with our test documents in this way.

Show the program a page of script, however, such as joined-up characters, and recognition performance tails off. This is not unusual, as no OCR package can deal with the irregularity in such documents, but it highlights the limitations of the technology.

Other additions include recognition of read-only pdf files and an option to output scanned documents as Wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML, retaining the original layout and content. We tried this latter feature on a number of scans and were impressed.

Contact: Widget 0800 138 1639
www.irislink.com

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/ME/2000/98/NT4/95
• Intel Pentium
• 32MB Ram (64MB recommended)
• 110MB hard disk space