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| Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh | |
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The hallmarks of good optical character recognition programs have not changed substantially in the past 15 years. They must be fast, accurate, versatile and work with popularly available scanners. Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh meets or exceeds all these requirements. Plus it’s currently the only available OS X OCR program compatible with Panther (10.3.x). Readiris Pro 9 also will work in OS 9, although its Portable Document File conversion capability isn’t available. Depending on how fast the scanner is, the speed of an OCR package is the sum of scanner image-capture speed and OCR processing of the scanned image. Readiris doesn’t supply its own scan driver. Instead, it uses your TWAIN-compliant software scanner driver or scanner plug-in from the scanner manufacturer to capture an image. This adds an additional step in the OCR process, but as long as your scanner has the appropriate TWAIN driver or plug-in for OS X, it assures compatibility. This approach means Image Recognition Integrated Systems incurs no additional costs in writing and supporting its own scan drivers. I tested the download version of Readiris Pro 9 with a relatively fast Epson Perfection Photo 3200, which sports both FireWire (IEEE-1394) and Universal Serial Bus ports. FireWire- based scans were approximately four times faster than USB 1.1 scans. Readiris 9 Pro converted a simple business letter at approximately 1,250 words per second on my 2GHz G5 with 2.5GB RAM. Recognition and conversion times will vary based on computer speed and RAM. To improve scanning speed or help with prescanned images, you use the Readiris Pro 9 preferences box. Scanner preferences are established in your scanner’s scan dialog box. Depending on the scanner, Readiris 9 Pro recommends a setting of 8- or 16-bit grayscale documents scanned at 300 dots per inch. Readiris’ OCR is optimal at 300 dpi, so any higher or lower might lead to character recognition mistakes. If you have a multipage scan option for your scanner, you can enable it and Readiris will scan and recognize multipage documents. Accuracy was exceptional when using good quality original documents such as business letters, interrogatories and briefs. As document quality diminished, so did the accuracy of the recognition process. Photocopied faxes produced the worst results. Readiris Pro 9 also experienced difficulty with numbers, symbols and fractions. This is common to all OCR applications. In virtually every case, it mistakenly recognized an “S” as a “5.” You can teach Readiris to recognize poorly formed letters and numbers with an Interactive Learning tool. Readiris can “Learn or Ignore” each flagged word or character, and subsequent documents will be much easier to proof. However, the process can become fairly time consuming. One interesting feature is Readiris’s ability to preprocess poorly scanned black and white or color images and optimize that image to enhance the conversion process. The process is detailed in the PDF manual. Readiris Pro opens and converts PDF documents and outputs them as text, HTML and rich text format. I tested PDF documents created by both Adobe Acrobat and Apple’s “print to PDF” option in the print dialog box. Readiris read and recognized both formats. The application’s interface is clean and uncluttered, which reflected a complete rewrite of the interface from previous versions. Its “one-button” recognition method will evaluate a page for text, graphics and table zones, and then convert the document into the format you choose. Controls also are provided to adjust imperfectly scanned documents and rotate, adjust or despeckle the document before starting the OCR process. Documents automatically can be processed for text or graphics, or you can retain complete control over which part of the page is converted. Readiris Pro 9 supports 104 languages, including Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. The user interface and manual are localized for English, French, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. Support for multipage scanners is included, although I was not able to test this option in my office. Zone recognition was hit and miss at times, but this should not be an issue with most law office documents. The only real problem I experienced was the quirkiness of the Epson scan driver in OS X.3.4. Otherwise, Readiris performed well with every original document format and PDF file I threw at it. I.R.I.S. also sells a corporate version with capabilities to scan business cards and synchronize output with mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants and the iPod. |
I.R.I.S. Inc. Price: $129.99 Mac OS 9.1 or higher, minimum Power PC processor or G3, 110MB of free hard disk space. Reviewed by David A. Saraceno, a practicing attorney and owner of Pixelcraft Studios, a presentation graphics consulting firm in Spokane, Wash. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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