Readiris Pro 9 OCR for Macintosh

Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh Readiris Pro 9 is an accurate, easy-to-use OCR (text recognition) software package that converts your every-day documents such as letters, faxes, magazine articles, columns in a newspaper etc. into computer-editable text files with a very high accuracy rate. About Readiris Pro 9 Options How to Use it Comparison Chart What the Press Says System Requirements Pricing & Options

About Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh

You will achieve text recognition perfection effortlessly. Readiris Pro 9 gives you a wealth of powerful yet easy-to-use tools to convert documents into electronic files, including Adobe Acrobat (PDF) documents. The new and improved features and extended capabilities of this latest version of Readiris Pro guarantee you the best possible results – every time!

Maximize your productivity and eliminate time-consuming manual retyping with Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh!!

To see some more information about Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh in a printer-friendly format, please click to download a PDF flyer about Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh. To be able to see your flyer, you need to have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, please click on the link to download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free.

Readiris Pro 9 for Mac Screen Shot; The input document. Click to view larger image.

Features of Readiris Pro 9

• New OCR engine for superior accuracy and speed
• Generation of Adobe Acrobat (PDF) output
• Support of digital cameras
• Automatic detection of the page orientation
• Foreign language support
• Support of multi-page documents/batch OCR
• Adjust image option
• Image despeckling
• Image deskewing
• Business Card Software (software option)
• I.R.I.S. Business Card Scanner (hardware option)
• Asian OCR add-on (software option)

Readiris Pro 9 for Mac Screen Shot; The output document. Click to view larger image.

Principal Features

Readiris Pro 9 offers more than 100 new and improved features. Take a look of the most principal features below!

New OCR engine for superior accuracy and speed
Readiris Pro 9 is simply the fastest OCR package in the world. The new OCR engine significantly increases the OCR accuracy and speed.

Generation of Adobe Acrobat (PDF) output
Readiris Pro 9 offers extensive PDF support. Paper documents can be converted into the Adobe Acrobat format. The resulting PDF files are fully searchable, compact and editable.

Support of digital cameras
Readiris Pro 9 recognizes snapshots captured with digital cameras.

Automatic detection of the page orientation
Readiris Pro 9 detects the orientation of a scanned document and rotates it automatically for optimal recognition.

Support of multi-page documents/batch OCR
Readiris Pro 9 supports scanners with a sheet feeder. Multi-page documents can be recognized automatically and saved in a single word processor file.

Adjust image option
You can adjust the image quality manually without rescanning. This feature allows you to optimize the recognition of difficult documents scanned in color.

Image despeckling
“Despeckling” removes the little spots (“salt and pepper noise”) on the image that disturb the text recognition.

Image deskewing
Readiris Pro 9 scans your business cards and converts them into real address records. All American and European languages are supported, including the Eastern-European languages. You can export the contacts to any application, for instance for mailing purposes, in standard formats such as the tab or comma delimited format. Alternatively, you can send the contacts directly to databases and contact managers such as AppleWorks 6, Microsoft Entourage (Mac OS X) and Microsoft Outlook Express (Mac OS 9.x) etc.

Business Card Software (software option)
Readiris Pro 9 scans your business cards and converts them into real address records. All American and European languages are supported, including the Eastern-European languages. You can export the contacts to any application, for instance for mailing purposes, in standard formats such as the tab or comma delimited format. Alternatively, you can send the contacts directly to databases and contact managers such as AppleWorks 6,
This option is present in the Readiris Pro 9 Business Edition

I.R.I.S. Business Card Scanner (hardware/software)
This comprehensive solution combines the business card reading feature with a dedicated business card scanner called “IBCR II”.

Asian OCR (software option)
Adds the recognition of four Asian languages - Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese - to your OCR software.

Foreign language support

Readiris Pro 9 recognizes up to 94 languages:
Afrikaans, Albanian, American English, Aymara, Basque, Bemba, Breton, British English, Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroes, Fijian, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Greek, Greenlandic, Haitian Creole, Hani, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, Indonesian, Interlingua, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Kicongo, Kinyarwanda, Kurdish, Latin, Lithuanian, Luxemburgh, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Maori, Mayan, Minangkabau, Nahuatl, Norwegian, Numeric, Nyanja, Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Rhaeto-Roman, Romanian, Rundi, Russian, Samoan, Sardinian, Scottish (Gaelic), Serbian, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tonga, Turkish, Ukrainian, Wolof, Xhosa, Zapoteco, Bulgarian - English, Byelorussian - English, Greek - English, Macedonian - English, Russian - English, Serbian - English, Ukrainian - English, Simplified Chinese (optional), Traditional Chinese (optional), Japanese (optional), Korean (optional). Optional Asian languages are available separately in the Asian OCR software upgrade

Readiris Pro 9 up to 6 user interface languages:
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.

Options

There is three new options available for Readiris Pro 9 for Mac Os: The Asian OCR Add-on, the Business Card Software Add-on and the Business Card Scanner Add-on.

Asian OCR Add-on

The “Asian OCR add-on” is a software option for Readiris Pro 9 that recognizes the Asian languages. The “add-on” complements the installed Readiris license. This version of the Asian OCR add-on is able to recognize four Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Contrary to the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, these languages use small icons (“ideograms”), not letters, to represent reality. These languages are based on a very large number – actually several thousand - of such ideograms and recognizing them requires specific, sophisticated OCR technology.

Asian OCR Add-on Features

• The “Asian OCR add-on” Readiris Pro (Windows or MacOS) to recognize 4 Asian languages containing thousands of characters (“ideograms”): Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
• The Asian documents are saved in the RTF (“Rich Text Format”) and Unicode (TXT) formats.
• A mixed character set is used: Readiris reads Asian text mixed with English text (used for “Western” words - proper names, product names etc.).
• Specific page analysis algorithms are used for Asian documents. (The interline spacing is bigger than with Western texts, the text is less “dense” because the words are made up of ideograms that could be seen as graphic zones in Western documents and the text may run from top to bottom, from right to left.)
• The automatic detection of the page orientation also applies to the Asian languages!

Technical Requirements
This extra module takes about 20 MB of hard disk space.

The Asian OCR “add-on” does not modify the system requirements of Readiris Pro (Windows or MacOS). However, you will need a localized Asian version of the Windows or MacOS operating system to make good use of Asian texts. Alternatively, you can run specialized “emulating” (or “overlay”) software such as UnionWay AsianSuite or TwinBridge AsianBridge on a Western version of Windows to imitate the Asian environment. Finally, you can use Word 2002 and Word 2000 to view and edit such documents: Office XP and 2000 were specifically designed to cope with documents in many different languages.

If your operating system is not “Asian-enabled”, you will inevitably generate illegible output whenever you try to display text in one of these languages.

Business Card Software Add-on

By installing this option, you recognize business cards with Readiris: scan your business cards, recognize them and convert them into an address database. In this context, optical character recognition allows to encode calling cards without the time-consuming task of retyping them. Think of your last exhibition when you came back with an entire stack of business cards and it took your secretary two days to encode them!

The card’s data is extracted automatically from the image and the recognized data is assigned to specific database fields. Readiris extensively uses a knowledge database, thus acquiring the necessary intelligence to discriminate the first and last name, a city and its state, a telephone and a fax number etc.
Each country has a different "style" of composing business cards, Americans compose an address differently than the French do etc. This works in no less than 24 languages – all American and European languages are available, the Eastern-European languages included.

The resulting data can be exploited in two ways. You can save your contacts in a structured file – for instance in the comma or tab delimited format – to export them to any address database – for instance the standard Mac OS X application Address Book. Alternatively, you can send the contacts directly to your contact management software such as Microsoft Entourage, AppleWorks 6, Now Contact etc.

Business Card Scanner Add-on

Dedicated business card scanners are optimized for scanning business cards and have many advantages over other scanner types: they hardly take up any space on your desk, swiftly cope with calling cards of varying paper and printing qualities and you never have to wonder about selecting the correct card format. Furthermore, the scanning couldn’t be easier: just insert a business card in the scanner and the scanning process starts automatically!

The IRIS Business Card Reader is the easiest way to input your contacts into your computer. Simply slide a business card into your scanner and in seconds the information is automatically transferred to your contact management database. The IRIS Business Card Reader will help you keep your contact database up-to-date and it relieves you of the tedious task of having to type card information in your computer. Powered by I.R.I.S. OCR, the Intelligent text recognition software used will accurately recognize and correctly place in the appropriate database fields the information on any business card.

Benefits of the Business Card Scanner:

Easy-to-use

IBCR II allows you to easily and accurately convert business cards into database records using I.R.I.S. powerful OCR technology

No more manual encoding

The card’s data is extracted automatically from the image and the recognized data is assigned to specific database fields. Readiris extensively uses a knowledge database, thus acquiring the necessary intelligence to discriminate the first and last name, a city and its state, a telephone and a fax number, etc.

Export function

The Automatic export allows you to import them in any address database such as the standard Mac OS X application Address Book. Alternatively, you can send the contacts directly to your contact management software such as Microsoft Entourage, AppleWorks 6, Now Contact, etc.

Features of the Business Card Scanner:

New OCR technology

Significantly increases the OCR accuracy. Your scanned images are immediately converted into database records, you now have a complete address and image database for your contacts.

Foreign language support

Recognizes up to 24 languages.

Business card processing

IBCR II supports all American and most European business card lay outs.

Color Card recognition

It makes the card perfectly legible for a better recognition. Zooming is always possible for more details.

New user interface

Improved scanner support

How to Use it

1. Scan
Easily open documents or capture documents from scanners or digital cameras:
Choose any document: complex column, text, graphics and table. Laser quality, degraded or dot matrix document
Single or multi-page documents, multilingual (Readiris supports 94 languages)
Open documents saved in JPEG, TIFF, BMP, etc. or scanned in color, in black and white or grayscale

2. Select
Choose the default settings for Readiris automatic processing
Use the editing tools for optimized recognition
Choose the language, deskew the page, despeckle the image, sort and select the areas, modify the window type
Define the output format of the OCR result
Define the layout of the OCR result

3. Recognize
Process the document:
Send automatically to Word, Excel or any program with Apple Event Dictionary
Save in the most popular output formats such as HTML, TXT, RTF, PDF, etc.
Recreate the original document layout

You have transformed your document into electronic format quickly, easily and accurately. You can now edit your document in your favorite application, save your document for later use or distribute the document around the world to family, friends or colleagues.

Comparison Chart

In the table below you will be able to compare the features of the last 3 versions of Readiris Pro to have an idea of the new and improved features available in version 9.0

What the Press Says

"Readiris 9 for Mac OS is a user-friendly OCR package that allows the user to convert paper documents into electronic files."
PAO, September 2002

"OCR for Macintosh – I.R.I.S. introduces version 9 of its OCR software."
Computable, September 2002

"This new version of the Optical Character Recognition software is optimized for Mac OS X."
SVM Mac, September 2002

"We can enjoy the simplicity of the software because nobody likes to learn complex applications. Any tool can be accessed quickly and intuitively. Who could ask for more?"
MacPlus, June 2002

"Very easy-to-use, Readiris Pro 9 detects the page orientation automatically, recognizes data and re-creates tables in Word and in Excel worksheets."
ITRNews.com, June 2002

"Automatically I.R.I.S. has introduced version 9 of its OCR software Readiris Pro. This new version offers a lot more than a carbonized look."
MacWorld, May 2002

"The software recognizes documents photographed with a digital camera."
Caractères, May 2002

"Readiris Pro is one of the best OCR packages and this new version should confirm its excellence."
MacPlus, March 2002

"Amongst the innovations and improvements, we find a new OCR (“Optical Character Recognition”) engine, the generation of PDF files, the support of digital cameras, the automatic page orientation, the recognition of business cards etc."
MacGeneration, March 2002

System Requirements

• A Mac OS Computer with a G3 processor
• Operating Systems: Mac OS X or OS 9.x - Runs native on Mac OS X systems
• 60 MB free disk space
• 32 MB free RAM
• Mac OS X or OS 9.x – Readiris runs native on Mac OS X systems
• QuickTime 4.0 and the system library CarbonLib 1.5 or later are required

Pricing & Options

This package includes the standard Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh, plus Business Card Software that enables you to scan business cards, recognize them and convert them into an address database.
 

This upgrade is for those who already have the Readiris Pro 9 for Macintosh, either the Standard Edition or the Corporate Edition, and want recognition of Asian languages. By getting this Asian OCR upgrade, you will get recognition of 4 extra Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Readiris Pro 9.0 is not included.