Readiris PRO 6

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that sets out to dowhat the human brain can do almost instantly: convert visual data into textualdata; in other words, read and understand printed text. To a certain extent,today's generation of OCR software manages to recognize most of the text thatyou can throw at it--still, it needs to be babysat.

Readiris Pro 6.0 will, fairly quickly, recognize large blocks of text with deftprecision--provided that the text is in a monospaced font with no page creasesor ink spots (these anomalies, among others, will cause unpredictable results).Readiris also has problems recognizing certain nonstandard fonts, such as thosethat are used in chapter headings, as well as italicized text.

Readiris Pro 6.0 claims to be over 99 percent accurate when recognizing text; however,practice shows it to be a few percentage points off. While 97 percent accuracylooks good on paper, it fails to impress when you are being forced to correctthe software whenever it makes a mistake. Granted, no software that attempts toduplicate a human brain is going be perfect, but the quirks that Readiris Prodisplays seem so trivial that it's a wonder that someone didn't fix them beforethe product was shipped.

When Readiris Pro 6.0 does find text that it thinks it is misinterpreting, it willpop up a window that shows you both the graphical portion of the document inwhich the text in question is located and the software's best guess of whatletter(s) it is trying to recognize. You then have the option to edit what thetext is interpreted as, and press either the "Learn" or "Don't Learn" button.

The need to double-check everything that you run through Readiris Pro 6.0, as wellas the interface itself, make scanning multiple-page documents a rather tedioustask. Not only is it necessary to run quality-assurance procedures on thesoftware's output, but there is virtually no assistance in the software forscanning large documents like books or essays.

Despite its flaws, however, Readiris Pro 6.0 proves to be a useful tool for scanning apage or two, here and there, which makes the time that it takes to press a dozenbuttons and correct a dozen words much less than it would take to type an entirepage. However, without improvements in accuracy and interface, it fails tosatisfy for scanning large bodies of text.--Victor Andersen