Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought ReadIris 7 based on its price and on the claims made on the package. It was terrible. ReadIris promos and manuals claim the program gets smarter as you use it. That is undoubtedly true, but it starts out so stupid that you have a huge amount of work ahead of you just to get it functioning even close to the way it should. Frequently it expects you to go through an entire document with it and tell it which bitmaps represent which letter. This can be incredibly time consuming.
When ReadIris 11 came out, I figured that four versions later it probably does the things it says it does. It doesn't. I still had the same problem with it garbling large portions of a text image, so I wanted to see what it would do with a perfect text. I created a Word file, saved it as a PDF, and then saved the PDF as a JPEG. Since the text was perfect, ReadIris should have been able to process it perfectly. However, it still garbled about 10 percent of the text and expected me to go through the bitmaps again and tell it how to read things.
ReadIris 11 is also very crash prone if your page contains graphics. The box and the manual say it can process these things well, but today it crashed five or six times trying to process a document that contained simple black-and-white graphics. It succeeded in processing it only after I went into a photo editing program and removed the graphics from the image. This crashing is a serious problem, because I have a brand-new Macintosh G5 with 1.5 GB of RAM. If it crashes so easily on my machine, what does it do in more modest computers?
One odd but telling thing about ReadIris 11 is that the box and manual claim that it can perform certain tasks "perfectly". If a software company is so naive as not to know that, in the US market, claiming a product performs "perfectly" can lead to an expensive fraud suit, it should set off an alarm in the consumer's head.
A far better Mac OCR program, which, sadly, is not sold as a standalone, is the OS X version of FineReader that was found on the utility disks that came with Epson all-in-one printers a year or two ago. In contrast to ReadIris, this program does perform almost perfectly, but you can't buy it in a box or as a download, unfortunately.
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IRIS ReadIris Pro 11.0 (Mac)Readiris Pro has won more than 80 industry awards and has over 12 million users worldwide.Version 11 is the only OCR software available for OS X Tiger!A new OCR engine makes Readiris Pro 11 better than ever, reaching up to 99.9% accuracy.With Readiris Pro 11 you can quickly and easily transform paper documents into electronic files you can edit and then output into your favorite application.Readiris Pro 11 not only retypes the text but also reproduces the original layout of your document perfectly, including columns of text, titles, fonts, bullets, tables, graphics and more.With Readiris Pro 11 you can also transform the information locked in PDF files into editable text.
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