Readiris is optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 software for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Mac OS

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

. It is produced by Belgian company Image Recognition Integrated Systems Group S.A. I.R.I.S. Group

I.R.I.S. Group

IRIS : Image recognition integrated systems is a computer software technology company that provides text recognition and document management solutions. IRIS is headquartered in Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium.-IRIS history:...

. Currently it is in version 12, Corporate Edition.

Readiris features regional packages, the "Asian Edition", "Middle Eastern Edition", which are able to read materials written in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.

The product offers the possibility to digitize

Digitizing

Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...

 hand-printed notes.

In September 2006 the I.R.I.S. OCR technology was selected for use in Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...

 8.0. DEVONthink

DEVONthink

DEVONthink is a Mac OS X program for intelligent document management and associative search. It is developed by the company DEVONtechnologies located in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, USA....

 Pro Office used Readiris as its OCR engine prior to v2.0.

Readiris is in competition with Expervision (TypeReader), Abbyy FineReader

ABBYY

ABBYY is a Russian software company, headquartered in Moscow, that provides optical character recognition, document capture and language software for both PC and mobile devices.-History:ABBYY was founded in 1989 by David Yang...

 and OmniPage

OmniPage

OmniPage is an optical character recognition application available from Nuance Communications.OmniPage was one of the first OCR programs to run on personal computers....

 as well as free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 such as GOCR

GOCR

GOCR is a free optical character recognition program, initially written by Jörg Schulenburg. It can be used to convert or scan image files into text files.- Features :...

 and Tesseract

Tesseract (software)

Tesseract is a free software optical character recognition engine for various operating systems.Originally developed as proprietary software at Hewlett-Packard between 1985 and 1995, it had very little work done on it in the following decade. It was then released as open source in 2005 by Hewlett...

.

External links

• Application website