Anyone who bought an HP scanner or multifunction device recently already owns optical character recognition (OCR) software from Iris. If you want to step up from the standard package supplied by HP or any other OCR software, Readiris Pro 10 is a worthwhile upgrade.

In the past, Readiris has been known for its speed and simplicity. As well as being able to convert scanned documents into text files quickly, it has always had a minimalist user interface.

Instead of pestering you with options, prompts and repetitive corrections, Readiris gets on with the job. It typically reads and converts a full-page scan of plain text in less than two seconds, providing a range of export file formats including Word, Excel and OpenOffice.

Iris has reworked the spartan user interface for this release. Two sets of three icons down a left-hand pane now represent the Scanning and Recognition steps. Clicking on any of these icons calls up the relevant options for that step, either as a small pop-up list or within a dialogue window.

A single column of buttons down the right-hand side provide mark-up and viewing tools for dealing with the scans shown in the central preview pane. Page scan thumbnails are shown to the left of the preview pane and individual page information given underneath.

This means you may never need to use the program menus. On the other hand, there is a sharp contrast between the cheerful icon-and-button interface and the grey, drab option windows.

The huge window for specifying the text formatting and export options is very challenging, especially since your choice of export format enables and disables options without explanation. It's not possible to save custom options as reusable selections, so if you want to switch between different text formats you must reset the options manually every time.

Readiris Pro 10 is good at retaining the original document layout, complete with text colour and all the pictures in place. However, the best results are achieved when generating Adobe PDF documents.

In addition to letting you convert scans to pure text or pure image PDFs, the program now offers two combination options. One is to preserve the full page scan with fully searchable OCR text underneath, while the other is to preserve the full page scan with the text areas digitally removed from the image and replaced with real OCR text on top.