Pardon the necropost. If you simply *must* have this, the new version is on sale until 10/26/2010:

http://www.irislink.com/c2-1791-189/IRI … rview.aspx

You'll need to get the Asian version to get Japanese language support. You don't need the executive, unless you're a barcode-scannin' fool.

If you already have a flatbed scanner, get good OCR software instead unless you're on the road a lot, and can deal with the pen's quirks. I don't use it very often anymore, unless I'm going to be entering in a lot of sentences from a book, and I don't have a flatbed handy. So... almost never. But since it's on sale, I figured I'd put it here, just in case.

Hi, I'm umming and ahing over buying it, does the flatbed scanner version - i.e. Readiris Pro Asian do vertical text? It seems like the pen does, but I can't say I'm that interested in the pen.

Also, how good is it? I've used google's freeware Japanese ocr, which gives a not awful result if the uploaded image is b&w bitmap, high resolution and sans-serif font without any formatting... but I wonder if I pay for the Readiris version am I going to see a massive improvement in quality, ability to deal with say paragraph indentations / block quotes, vertical text etc? That would be worth the money even if Google makes a much better free one in 5 years or so.

I haven't been able to use Readiris Pro (I have v11, v12 is the current version) with my scanner in a while, because my old scanner won't work with Win 7, so I can't say anything too definite, just what I can foggily remember. I can say it will scan vertical text, and it does a fairly good job of scanning Japanese.

It has a hard time with underlined text, and underlines in general, which is really annoying.

What it does *not* do a good job of doing is scanning Japanese and English text combined on a page. It will either scan the Japanese text and mess up the English, or scan the English and mess up the Japanese. It doesn't do a good job of both. (You have to set the language in one of the menus and rescan. Pain in the neck.)

But it does do a reasonably good job of scanning PDF and JPG files, which is handy.

Maybe someone else has other OCR info? Search for OCR in the forums and see what turns up.

Oh, if you do decide to get the IRIS version of anything, make sure you get the Asian version, or else you won't get Japanese language support.

Last edited by rich_f (2010 October 17, 3:18 pm)

Thanks rich_f, the all Japanese isn't a problem, and the price is definitely better. To be honest, a Japanese producer is likely to have better technology at recognising their own language than a foreign competitor, I would have thought!
However.... 残念 i have a mac so no go for either cheap 読んde!!ココ or the expensive omnipage.
Looks like my only option is in fact iris!

Thanks for your help! Being able to read vertical text, was the biggest thing for me.