1666

Provides: OCR capabilities in a hand-held "pen"

Developer: I.R.I.S.

Requirements: Mac Classic or Mac OS X (Panther compatible)

Retail Price: $129.99 (Express) & $199.99 (Executive)

The IRISPen Express provides the ability to scan selected text in images directly into any program, while the IRISPen Executive can do text and images and adds bar code reading, the ability to read handwritten numbers, and dot matrix text to the mix. If you can carefully drag the pen across your text, you will get great results. Otherwise, be patient and try again.

The image to the right shows the IRISPen Express icon with the orange butterfly on the left and the Executive's icon with the red butterfly on the right.

First, a small elaboration on what this pen is doing: As you drag the pen across text in a book, it is scanning and concurrently turning the picture of the text it just scanned into editable text that any program you have open can receive as if the text was coming from the keyboard.

With that in mind, who's this gadget for? OK, let's say you're sitting in the library looking at some tables or text in a book. You need the data, but not the whole page, so photocopying the whole page would be a waste. Or, you're sitting in your office and want to capture the citation of an article you've found. Or, you're sitting in your kitchen and want to capture the ingredients to a recipe. For any of these scenarios, you can either:

1. Type out all the text by hand.


2. Scan the page and use OCR to turn the scan into editable text.


3. Grab the IRISPen and scan only the lines you need into editable text.

If you are one of those people who can type out 60+ words a minute, stop reading unless you want to snidely giggle at those of us who cannot. You've already selected option (1), leave me alone.

There are several problems with option (2), such as, if you are in a library, you probably do not have a scanner. Besides, if you are needing to convert pages and pages of material into editable text, a scanner and ReadIRIS version 9 is the way to go (read my review). But, for just a few lines here and there, it's hard to justify the setup time.

This brings us to option (3), the IRISPen. Simply plug the eight foot USB cable into your computer, start the IRISPen software, click into the program you want to receive the text and scan away. Well, mostly.

By itself, the IRISPen looks somewhat awkward. There are two buttons, one on the top and one on the side. In the rear on the top is a two-position slide button that currently has no function, it may in the future. Each button is programmable and, the default settings for the buttons provide a carriage return and a tab, respectively. The carriage return button lets you start new paragraphs after each line of scan or after each paragraph of text. The tab can be used when entering text into a database or spreadsheet and to move from field to field or cell to cell.

As you can see in the image below, there are three "sled" like projections at the tip, so, when the pen is placed on a page, it will tilt back and to the right, just like a pen. This pen is meant to be used in the right hand. There is a "technique" for the pen to be used by left-handed people that involves using it upside down and having the software flip scan 180° letting the result come out right.

A close up of the tip shows the wheel that, when pushed, starts the process, and, when released, stops the process. The wide light region to the left is the light emitter, and just below that is a smaller rectangular region that is the image receptor. On the body are three lines marking the reading "region." You want the text you want to convert to align with the middle sized line in the center.

To use the IRISPen, it's best to not try to work fast. It's not that the software cannot turn the scan into text quickly, it can. It's just that trying to rush the process simply doesn't work. Lay the pen on the page about 1/4 to 1/2 inch before the text you want to scan—not on the text. As you set the pen down, the wheel is pushed in, causing the pen's light to turn on. Before you start scanning, adjust the pen so it lies flat on the skies. This means the pen will be tilted back and to the right. If the pen is not lying flat on its skies, it drags poorly and the image will be out of focus. If the pen is dragging easily and the wheel is turning smoothly, you are holding the pen properly.

Before using the pen, start the IRISPen software. The software will display a large swag of scanning region across the bottom of your computer screen. The IRISPen screen is wide because the IRISPen can scan up to 11.7 inches at a time. It doesn't make a difference if you start the program you want to scan into before or after the IRISPen's software.

The output from the IRISPen can either be keyboard emulation (what I focused on), clipboard, (for images), or apple events--I did not test this aspect at all.

Truth be told, I find that TextEdit is a good program to scan into, but you can scan into any program that can accept text input from a keyboard. Regardless, from text edit, you can copy and paste the text to wherever you want it to go. I also strongly recommend that until you get used to using the IRISPen, you use the button on the top to start a new line after each scan of text. This approach lets you scan any given line as many times as necessary and easily delete the lines that have more errors than you want to correct. Once you are sufficiently skilled with the IRISPen, you can scan continuously, line after line. There are built in prefix and suffix functions that can automatically place a space at the end of each line, so, if you continue scanning without hitting the carriage return, the next line will not be butted up against the proceeding word. The software also has the ability to join words that had a hyphen at the end of a line. The prefix function let's you (for example) automatically add a "$" sign to each bit of scanning.

Both the Express or the Executive can scan text (from 89 languages) or images in either black and white or grayscale. No color. When scanning an image, the image is held in the clipboard and you can paste the image into any image that accepts bitmapped images (e.g. Photoshop) for cleaning up and/or altering or into Word if that's sufficient. I do not recommend that you consider trying to stitch together a large image from multiple scans of an image, and instead suggest leaving the IRISPen to small images. While you can scan images, the IRISPen is not meant to be an image scanner.

There are two ways to set the IRISPen's settings. There is a floating palette with access to the primary settings. Alternatively, one can go to the "Settings" menu. One can save (and recall) a settings arrangement in the Settings menu, but there is no option to do this from the Palette. One other limitation to the palette is that there is no visual feedback of what you've set. There is limited feedback on whether you are in text mode, image mode, or bar code mode on the scanning region mentioned above. Fortunately there are pop-ups telling you what any given icon represents.

As you can see below, the IRISPen screen shows what the scan looked like and the TextEdit shows the result of my scanning a paragraph from a woodworking magazine. You can see from my scan, I did not scan a straight line but the text was accepted just fine. There were two errors (both corrected) with a single quote placed after the word "posts" in the first line, and the last "l" in the last line was capitalized. (I also deleted the last word "For" from the TextEdit copy. This was not an error; it was read, I just didn't want it.) The only other error was the emdash was turned into a standard hyphen. By the way, the line read is always in the middle of the scan. Any line above or below (if there) the middle is ignored, you can only scan one line at a time.

Over time, I've gotten better with the scans, but it does take a bit of practice and some finesse. When I first started with the IRISPen, I was very disappointed, but now my accuracy is fairly good.

As stated, both the IRISPen Express and Executive can read text and images. However, to do bar codes, hand numbering, and dot-matrix text, you need to spend some $70 more and get the Executive version. Hardware wise, there is no difference between the two, only the software is different. In fact, the superstructure of the Executive is there with the Express software because, in the Preference Palette, the option of Bar Codes is there, but grayed out: intentional or a tease, I don't know.

Despite my initial problems with reading text with the IRISPen, at least when I look at text, scan it and look at the scan, I can see the error relatively easily and fix it in the resultant copy or simply rescan. But a bar code means that you have to carefully look at the numbers and/or text below or above the code to see what those lines of varying thickness and placement are supposed to mean. Despite that extra burden, I found the bar code reading eventually accurate. I say eventually because I was having two levels of problems: Sometimes I would scan a bar code and nothing would happen. Nothing. Repeated scans produced nothing. I could scan another code and there'd be no problem, but when I went back to the problem code, nothing.

The other problem is that occasionally the last number would be dropped. That is, if the code was supposed to be "104534544," I might get "10453454." Again, repeated scans would not solve the problem.

Here is where the provided "Help" sucked. If you looked up Bar Code in the supplied help, there isn't even a mention of the term. As I was digging around in the menus, I found one that proved to be the problem. It was called "Verify and Erase Check Digit." By unchecking this item, the last digit was magically appearing in my scans. However, I have a feeling that, for proper bar code scanning, it's probably better to leave this item selected.

My other problem turned out to be that I had fine-tuned the "Adjust Settings" setting. I had set it to be a bit darker than originally set for some other scanning I was doing. By returning the settings to "Automatic" I had magically repaired the problem where nothing was happening during scans. Now, it worked fine.

Onto hand-printing recognition...

My handwriting is not a pretty sight, so, when I prepare a message, I usually print. In addition, I tend to use capitol letters. I find them easier to create than lower case letters. It turns out that IRISPen didn't like my lower case at all and wasn't too thrilled about my upper case letters.

Below are three attempts to capture my name in either upper or lower case, my e-mail address here at Applelinks, and an extra attempt to just capture some numbers. (Each of the scans on the left side are actual scans made by the IRISPen and brought into Photoshop for cleaning and turning into "GIFs" for web use. (The e-mail scan was reduced in size a bit to fit into the table cell. Originally, it was equal in size as the other samples.)) By the third attempt, I finally got my first name using upper case, but lower case just couldn't do it. Trying to capture my e-mail would only make a Newton proud. Likewise, number reading was unsuccessful.

As far as my experiences with dot-matrix printing, I only had one sample and both software versions, Express and Executive did just fine. I found no difference in either version's ability to transcribe the scan into text. There was no special setting for dot-matrix printing, I simply used the text mode.

Speaking of the various modes, in the Help file there is reference to an automatic mode so you do not need to tell the software you are scanning text, bar codes, or an image. I was never able to find such a setting. Certainly, leaving the reading mode in any of the three did not let me successfully scan any other type of the three.

I believe the value of the IRISPen needs to be balanced with what you plan on using it for. If you have a significant amount of OCR scanning to do, you would be much better off with a standard scanner and the ReadIRIS software mentioned earlier in this review. If you need only a few lines here and there, and feel that scanning would be faster than your typing, then go for it. I would say if you need the occasional paragraph, you might be a good candidate for the IRISPen. Less than that, you should type it. More than that, scan it.

The IRISPen itself is somewhat awkward to hold. I have a medium-sized hand and I found it tolerable. If you have a small hand, you might have problems. If there ever was a product that would be a good candidate for Bluetooth connectivity, the IRISPen is the product. While there is ample USB cable (8 feet), it is a bit of a drag, no pun intended.

The last comment to make has to do with the overall user interface, which is a bit convoluted. As mentioned, you need to have the IRISPen software running and whatever program you want the text to appear in. If you want to alter a setting, you need to click into the IRISPen software, make the setting change, then click back into the program to continue scanning. I also found that waiting a moment between lines improved the success for each scan. So, the process is (1) scan, (2) look at screen and see what happened, (3) look at page and scan the next line, (4) look at screen and see what happened, etc. Certainly faster than typing (once you are good at the process), but the process is certainly not automatic.

There is one limitation of the IRISPen's design: if you try to read the bottom of text from a book or bar code from the bottom of boxes, you will find that there is no place to press the wheel against to start the scanning process. You may have to build little support areas to press the wheel to initiate the scanning process or something, but there is no easy solution for this inherent problem.

One bit of irony I found with these two software items is the name of the fancier version: "IRISPen Executive." Deep in my heart, I cannot imagine the process of scanning bar codes being performed by an executive. To me, this is a work detail that an executive has other people do. Perhaps a name like IRISPen FullFeatures might have been better, but, then again, I was never asked.

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___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

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