The new IRIS Readiris Pro 11 optical character recognition software makes fast work of turning paper documents into electronic text files that keep the original formatting and design elements intact. IRIS has improved the app's OCR engine, and in my tests it often delivered notably increased speed and accuracy over previous versions.

I tested a shipping version of the new Readiris Pro ($110, street) with an HP Scanjet 4890 flatbed scanner and successfully converted a slew of color and monochrome documents, ranging from simple one-column reports to complex multicolumn pages with text and graphics.

The new software recognized and saved one 50-page sample document in half the time that the previous version, Readiris Pro 10, took to perform the same task (90 seconds versus 180 seconds on the same setup). Not all of my tests netted such dramatic results, but most showed at least a modest improvement.

After scanning each document, Readiris Pro automatically identified various text elements--including columns, tables, and bulleted or numbered lists--and quickly converted them into an editable format with a high degree of accuracy. It also converted graphics (such as photos) and other design elements (rules, color text, and backgrounds), and it recreated the source-document layout in various output formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and Excel document formats.

Like the previous version, this OCR utility can recognize bar codes and some hand-printed notes. However, I found the rules for accurate handwriting recognition (carefully formed numbers and uppercase letters, completely separated from one another) too restrictive and time-consuming for practical use. More helpful is the software's added support for Microsoft Excel HTML and SpreadsheetML, as well as for OpenOffice.org Writer 2.0 and Sun StarOffice 8.0.

If your business regularly involves OCR work, Readiris Pro 11 can significantly boost your productivity. For veteran users, the improvements in performance, accuracy, and document layout retention easily justify the upgrade.