Description:
With the Readiris Pro series, I.R.I.S. has taken a quick, accurate OCR program and given it the ability to detect page layout and reproduce images. Readiris Pro 7.0 does a decent job at what it's supposed to do, but it's not without a fair number of flaws and flukes. The problems for us started with installation. Readiris Pro didn't recognize our Microtek flatbed scanner when we went through the otherwise handy setup wizard. It did, however, when we asked it to check out our TWAIN drivers through the File menu. When we were further plagued, this time by error dialogs, we were told by I.R.I.S. tech support that XP users need a patch, which is available through the cluttered I.R.I.S. Web site. Readiris Pro, like any OCR program, scans a document and then imports it into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word. The program scans text-only documents with alarming accuracy, and its error count is reduced by an interactive learning feature that verifies letters it doesn't understand. It faithfully recreates double-column text, and even text scattered in little blocks, newspaper style. Readiris Pro is supposed to be able to grab pages with images and recreate them with similar ease, but it had trouble with some of the pages we scanned. Sometimes it saw parts of logos--which should come through as graphics--as letters. Stylized lettering gave the program recognition trouble. In one case, it saw a table as a graphic, making it impossible to edit in Word. Through its problems, Readiris Pro is a workable OCR program, but it's worth your time to check out reviews of its competition. --Joel Durham, Jr.
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