ReadIris Pro OCR Software
Albert W. Starkweather, Philatelic Communicator
In his articles on digital references and studies, Francis Adams discusses useful software tools — optical character recognition (OCR) and photo editing. There are great pieces of software available for both Macintosh and Windows computers, one moderately priced, that should satisfy your OCR needs.
ReadIris Pro for OCR
Unless one is a master typist or has access to one, optical character recognition is the alternative to converting printed documents into editable text. Most scanners come with some bundled version of OCR software; most is inferior. When Xerox TextBridge Pro was no longer developed for Macintosh, I tested several programs and finally settled on ReadIris Pro 11 (www.irislink.com) because of its ease of use, reliability, and competitive pricing.
ReadIris works seamlessly with my scanner and Microsoft Word, handling most good source material automatically. Good means printed text that is printed in black on a white background in a traditional font, such as Times. Gray or colored type and that on non-white backgrounds works less successfully, as does sans serif or extremely stylized fonts.
Read Iris window
Setting up the software is extremely easy, mostly involving selecting your scanner and target application from drop-down lists — an Epson Perfection scanner and MS Word in my case. Converting a document involves turning on the scanner, placing a document on its bed, and clicking acquire on the ReadIris screen. The document is then scanned, recognized, and then copied and pasted into the word processing program. With good source material accuracy is nearly 100 percent.
There is a more interactive approach to problematical material, which allows the user to define areas to be scanned, to train recognition of characters the program does not recognize, and to set other customized options. The automated process takes only seconds, while the interactive method may take up to several minutes, depending on the number of characters that are not recognized. Similar documents will be processed much more quickly once training information is saved.
No matter which approach is used, it is very important to proofread carefully once the text is imported.
Street price is about $110, a whopping $390 less than its leading competitor, OmniPage Pro 16. 
