[booboo]

All I want to do is scan mostly pages from magazines and have the text turned into (editable) text, and pictures into jpeg's or gif's - whichever is appropriate - and for the original page layout to be reconstructed

I'm not even asking for handwriting recognition . . .

I used to be able to do this 3 years ago in OS 8.6/9 - can't remember the app, but it came free with an old Umax SCSI scanner. But I'd like to do it in 10.3, with my Canon USB scanner.

Is there an app that actually:

• Works now, not in a few version's time?
• Doesn't crash on the first run, and forever thereafter (like the version of ReadIris given away with MacUser) despite re-installs, trashed pref's, etc?
• Provides usable results?

I know this is a lot to ask of an application, but here's hoping . . .

[Mithras]

The OCR in Adobe Acrobat isn't bad.

[JKT]

I haven't had the opportunity to read it yet, but there is an article about OCR software for OS X at Applelinks

[booboo]

Thanks for the replies.

The 'review' of ReadIRIS makes it sound like the dog's bollocks, to coin a phrase. But iut looks and feels like a cheap Win98-port - well at least the one window I get before it bails out does. That, of course, is not to say it doesn't work well. It may well do. It's just my copy doesn't work at all . . .

I may continue with it and see if I can get it going.

Built in OCR in Acrobat (presumably the very expensive non-Reader version of Acrobat?) sounds very interesting, especially if it works as well as most Adobe app's. Presumably it's geared toward pdf creation, whereas I'm more interested in scan to web-page conversion . . .

Anyway, I thought 10.3 was supposed to have some built-in OCR capabilities, and if so it's deeply surprising that there aren't a load of shareware app's levering its capabilities - instead of 2 maybe 3 app's doing it all their (non-System) way . . .