Readiris Pro 6 by I.R.I.S

Accurate OCR ( optical character recognition / text recognition) Software

Readiris Pro 6 is an easy-to-use and accurate OCR (optical character recognition/text recognition) software that converts your every-day printed documents such as letters, faxes, magazine articles, columns in a newspaper, etc. into editable text files with a very high rate of recognition accuracy. The product works in conjunction with your scanner or other input device to interact with your document processing software (Word, WordPad, etc.) to convert the graphic image produced by your scanner to content that can be recognized as text within the document processing software.

In the latter part of 2001 a representative of I.R.I.S. gave a presentation of Readiris Pro 6 to TCCUG's membership at its monthly meeting. His presentation was flawless and every challenge he gave the product produced perfect results with little or no effort. Up to that time I had been using an older version of Omnipage, which produced nowhere near the recognition accuracy or ease of use I had just witnessed. OCR technology had "come a long way - baby".

Fortunately, the presenter provided a review copy to Richard D. Jones, our review coordinator, which he promptly advertised as available for review in our monthly newsletter and posted the information to this site. Time passed and amazingly no one jumped at the chance to try the product and do the review. Their loss; My gain. I have now been using the product about a month and cannot say enough nice things about it.

My requirements for document conversion are not extensive or extremely involve and most often involve converting clients paper based advertising document to digital format for Wed site development usage. Although Readiris Pro 6 can maintain the documents format (text and graphic layout), seldom is it necessary.

Readiris Pro 6 supports 56 languages and any TWAIN-compliant scanner. When I originally tested it, Readiris did an excellent job of preserving page formatting, including color graphics and tables, and its text recognition was near perfect after slight changes in scanning brightness and resolution. The documentation for making those changes could be better, but trial and error reinforces knowledge and gives one a sense of accomplishment. You can export documents directly into Microsoft Word, WordPad, or Excel, or save them in any of several popular generic formats, including RTF and HTML. I believe version 7 (now available) will also create Adobe's PDF. Readiris's OCR Wizard makes scanning and conversion a snap for novices, and the software is lightning-fast. A full-page magazine article full of text and a sprinkling of graphics will convert into a Word document in about 10 seconds. Additional tools such as despeckling and deskewing are available once the image is captured. After a bit of use, the whole process becomes mundane. Push a button here; Push a button there; The job is done. Life can be so good when everything fall into place!

Selling price at their Web site store is $99.99 for Version 7.

Features:

• Superior OCR accuracy at up to 1,000 characters per second on a fast computer
• New OCR engine significantly increases the OCR accuracy and speed
• Color documents Opens documents saved in JPEG, recognises documents scanned in color, including text on color backgrounds and saves pictures in color
• Recognition of Euro Symbol New European currency sign included
• Verification and learning tools Easy correction of mistakes, possibility to train the system on new symbols
• Autoformat technology Recreates the original document layout, including graphics and tables. Outputs to wordprocessors and spreadsheets Generates ASCII, RTF and HTML output. Sends the result directly to ANY applications such as Word, Excel, AppleWorks, Claris Works
• Automatic table recognition Detects and reads tables, recreates table objects in Excel, in Word and in RTF files
• Automatic Table Recognition Detects and reads tables, recreates table object in Excel, in Word and in RTF files. Recognition of "ungridded" tables
• Auto button Single-click OCR for automatic processing
• Scanner support - supports all the scanners that use the Photoshop plug-ins technology
• Graphic input - color, greyscale and black-and-white images in FlashPix, GIF, JPEG, MacPaint, PhotoShop, PICT, PNG, QuickDraw GX, QuickTime, Silicon Graphics, Targa, TIFF, Windows Bitmaps (BMP)
• Allows direct recognition of fax files
• Alows "drag and drop" of images onto the Readiris image zone
• Text output - All leading Macintosh wordprocessor applications and text formats including ASCII, RTF and HTML
• Direct export of OCR result to any applications
• Paragraph detection ensures wordwrap
• Table output - generic table format, including Excel
• Direct export of OCR result to spreadsheet and wordprocessor
• Graphic output - black-and-white, greyscale and color graphics in the output
• Graphics included in text file when "auto-formatting" is applied
• Fonts - virtually any proportional and fixed ("mono- space") typeface
• Normal, bold, italic and underlined typestyles
• Detection and recreation of font type, typestyle and point size of original document in "auto- formatting" mode
• Character sizes 6 to 72 point (0,08 to 1" or 0.21 to 2.54 cm)
• Drop letter ("drop caps") recognition
• Character sets
• All American and European character sets, including the Central-European, Cyrillic ("Russian") and Greek alphabets
• Use of mixed character sets for recognition of "Western" words (proper names, brand names etc.) in Cyrillic ("Russian") and Greek documents
• Numeric mode for recognition of tables and figures
• Trainable on any special symbol: mathematic and scientific symbols, dingbats etc
• Zoning - automatic page analysis discriminates text zones, graphics, gridded and ungridded tables
• Adjustable manual windowing of relevant zones
• Storage of zoning templates for future use