What is Readiris Pro 6.06?

OCR software - bundled with HP Scanner

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Though it has its problems, Readiris Pro 6 optical character recognition (OCR) software does a serviceable job of converting nearly 50 languages into editable text. It didn’t translate our English, Turkish, and Italian documents with 100 percent accuracy, but we got respectable results.

Readiris is adept at handling complex page layouts, but you need to prepare documents before starting the recognition process. When Readiris acquires a page as a scanned image, the software marks text, graphics, and tables with boxes of various colors. It also uses a system of arrows, which you are free to rearrange, to point in the direction the software will read the text. You can choose to re-create the original document’s layout when you export text, but we suggest avoiding this option, since oftentimes the text will flow incorrectly. You’ll get best results if you first delete all graphics from the document, then export it as straight text into Word or SimpleText.

The software’s main downfall is its buggy nature. While it had no problem handling PICTs and JPEGs, at times it refused to open TIFF files. Sometimes Readiris would even unexpectedly quit without rhyme or reason.

Although most scanners allow you to scan directly into Readiris, as of press time, those using TWAIN scanning software can’t. I.R.I.S. is working on a fix, which should be ready by the time you read this. This omission is no big deal, since there is a workaround, but we would have saved time and avoided aggravation if either the (badly written) manual or I.R.I.S.’s tech support department had mentioned it.

Readiris is a useful product for those who need OCR help. But in addition to a PowerPC and 22MB of RAM, you’ll need a fairly high tolerance level to deal with this quirky software.

Lu, Cathy. (October 2000). Readiris Pro 6. MacAddict. (pg. 65).

Download Readiris Pro 6.06 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.6 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver