Iris ReadIrisPro 11 review

ReadIrisPro 11 is Iris's attempt to improve the accuracy and speed of its already excellent optical character recognition (OCR) software.

First on the list is improved support for converting PDFs into editable text. The software was word perfect when we tried it on a simple text PDF, but for documents with more formatting, such as larger headline fonts, minor errors crept in. As with previous versions, the software struggles when given complicated layouts involving tables and pictures. The same applies to printed documents.

While ReadIrisPro is good at taking a page full of graphics, and even a background colour, and stripping the text out of it, the new version also has the option to retain the original's colour and layout. In practice, the results were far from perfect, creating blocks of colour instead of smooth background tints. The quality of the OCR was excellent, though, and better than that of Abbyy's FineReader.

There are times when speed is more important than accuracy. ReadIrisPro caters for this with its quick conversion option. You may never need to use this setting, though, as the OCR process was extremely fast with the software set to full accuracy, taking just a few seconds for complex documents.

One of the best new features is the ability to scan tables directly to Excel. The quality of the conversion was excellent and needed little tidying up. Support for different languages is strong and you can easily swap to a new language, both for documents and in the software interface. But you will have to buy a dedicated version of the software if you work with languages that use special characters, such as Arabic, Hebrew or Chinese.

If you have a previous version of ReadIris or Abbyy's FineReader and only need to convert the occasional document, there's little reason to upgrade. If you want a new application, or you scan a lot of tables, this is an excellent buy.

Author: Sam Ellis