Have you ever been given a load of documents for work or for study and wished there was some way you could edit them on your computer, without having to type up the entire document first?

Specialist in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software IRIS has been offering up a solution for being able to scan, save and edit paper documents for some time now. Although it's best known for providing office solutions with its Readiris Pro series of software, a more affordable home version is also available with a few more streamlined but useful options, aptly titled Readiris Home.

Of course, it would be hypocritical of IRIS to bundle in a hefty instruction manual along with the software, so it's worth taking a look through the help PDF once the software is installed. The good news is that if you're a little impatient and prefer to get going right away, the OCR wizard is available to guide you through the entire process.

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Specifically designed for home users, the controls for Readiris 12 Home's interface are fairly intuitive. Straight away it's possible to choose whether you are going to source your text documents using a scanner or by importing an image file.

The OCR Wizard did a pretty good job of complying with our ancient HP all-in-one printer/scanner, even though we were dubious it was going to be able to communicate with it. In fact there was an impressive list of compatible models from a wide range of different manufacturers available. Once the scanner model was set up it was possible to adjust the resolution of the scan, the colour, contrast and brightness settings and other optimization options.

With an impressive range of output options, Readiris 12 Home does a good job of allowing you to process the recognised scans and save them in a wide variety of different application formats, including the likes of Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat and HTML.

This means that once the software has finished recognising the text it can automatically open your OCR document in your preferred format and you can get editing, or simply archive the file. If the document you are scanning includes graphics or tables there are some options to optimise these too.

The actual scanning process using Readiris 12 Home doesn't take long at all, and after a short time it's possible to take a look at how well the software has sussed out the layout of your document.

We found it quite easy to use the simple tools along the right-hand side of the interface to tweak the software's recognition areas and manually add in text, graphic or table windows. It managed to get this right most of the time, but with documents that included a mixture of text, graphics and tables we found it needed a little helping hand. Of course, once the ‘Recognize and Save' button is pressed there's not much you can do other than cross your fingers and hope it manages to capture everything in order.

Our experience with the OCR performance using Readiris 12 Home was a little hit and miss. When scanning clear, crisp prints in a serif font it did a pretty good job of capturing and exporting everything accurately and it was possible for us to archive these saved files very quickly, happy that they were accurate representations of our original document.

Sometimes punctuation threw the software off the scent a little and this meant there were a few silly mistakes here and there. Of course, the only way to spot these was to manually sit and read through the captured text in its entirety: after spotting one mistake it was difficult to trust that the rest of the document was error-free.

Despite advertising that the software can scan and recognise faxes, we found it had quite a bit of trouble coping with the inconsistent print levels and scan lines that most fax printers churn out. For documents formatted with large line breaks, centre formatting and other bullet points it often also threw up quite a lot of gobbledegook. In these cases, even after tweaking import settings such as resolution we ended up giving up our battle and admitting defeat.

In our tests, Readiris Home 12 was a bit hit and miss on the OCR front. When it's offered a fairly simple, good quality print document with unfussy prose it copes impressively well. Importing documents presented no problems and we found it easy to use the program's Wizard. However, we found that for less pristine documents (like faxes) or text with heavy punctuation use and awkward formatting it struggled quite a bit. For all exported documents we found it a good idea (and often quite a time-consuming process) to sit through the text and check for errors. This is good product if you regularly want to edit and archive documents, but the accuracy of the results is dependent on the quality of the original document.