1 You can set Readiris up so that scans are directly imported into the program or you can simply open up images created by a scanner in the program. Here you can see how a page of iCreate is broken down into 26 different editable regions.

2 Once your file is loaded you can use the Page Analysis feature to get Readiris to analyse the document and break it down into areas of text and graphics. Each area is given its own number and box. You can choose which of these are ‘recognised’.

3 Once Readiris has finished recognising the document you can turn it into an editable file that can be opened in either Microsoft Word or TextEdit. As you can see from the screenshot below, all the formatting, including table data, is intact.

What’s good: Very accurate results, the best OCR software for the Mac we’ve seen, an impressive number of languages supported

What’s bad: Interface is fiddly and software is prone to crashes