IRIS ReadIris Pro 6.0

Readiris is one of the better-known OCR (optical character recognition) programs, partly because IRIS has deals with Hewlett Packard, Agfa and others to bundle the entry-level version with their scanners and multifunction machines. You may already know the basic program, but the full version - Readiris Pro 6.0 - is bigger and better in nearly all respects.

A wizard helps set the software for your scanning device and select the target application for output. The program can feed the text it processes into newer versions of Word and Excel, and into older ones with the aid of macro scripts. A wide range of other applications is supported, too, going back to DisplayWrite and MultiMate.

As with most modern OCR packages, Readiris offers to maintain the layout of the original as it's scanned. It does this extremely well, recognising areas of text and graphics and even recreating tabular information in Word tables.

The software can read colour originals and will include scanned colour graphics in recognised pages. If your scanner has a feeder it will OCR multi-page documents automatically.

Readiris Pro 6.0 does a pretty good job of recognising text. Regular fonts cause it no problem and pages often come through word perfect. If you want to recognise text in headers and footers or in fancy fonts, things become a bit more hit and miss. However, the program's learning mode, where it makes guesses and you confirm or refute each one, improves its accuracy further.

The new version reads foreign texts. It supports 56 different languages, including those that don't use the Roman alphabet and, if you want to install them, Chinese and Japanese. You'll need suitable foreign language fonts, and foreign language versions of Windows too.

Readiris Pro 6.0 offers professional OCR at a very realistic price and will upgrade from virtually any Twain-compatible scanning device.

Contact Transform 01959 578300
Prestige Networks 01635 866888