SO frustrating! I have just bought the new v14 (up to 14.0.3 already - MacUpdate please catch up!) and it is the same mess that it always was. The program does have a lot of features and such so I have to give it to them, and it does work pretty well at character recognition. I own Prizmo but have not tried its OCR yet. Meanwhile ABBY does just about everything ReadIRIS does, only faster and more accurately. The rest of the time it's hard to convince them. Seems the only time they realize you're a customer is when they want to sell something. Releases are expensive through the company but they constantly spam you with 'great deals!' and 'last chance!' (especially for their associated pen reader) - a lot like owning Toast, in that regard. 12.04 to 12.05, you have to call them up, deal with the usual nonsense, and beg, plead, and demand until they send you the release, which really should be going to all customers automatically. If you are having problems and need a point update, e.g. Bugs continue unabated and usability is never improved. Updates are very expensive and in my experience, very little changes from version to version. I got this when it was just about the only game in town. The UI is a bit Windows like, but that does not worry me.

I think the software does what it claims to do. I had no problems installing, activating and registering version 17 in High Sierra 10.13.4. I did have trouble activating version 15 a few years ago, but I got a prompt response from the support site and had no further problems. This necessitated leaving MacUpdate and going into the IRIS website. I was able to upgrade from my version 16 software for $69. You can also save documents in a multi-page format, which is handy for pdf. There are more export options available too. The ability to save the file as pdf, doc or xls is great. I have found the OCR engine quite accurate. Then I tried Readiris, which was ported across from Windows I think. ViewScan has rudimentary OCR and did the trick for a while. There is a dearth of OCR software for the mac and when my previous software (OmniPage I think) stopped being supported I had to look elsewhere. I have not had the problems reported below. I have been using Readiris Pro for a number of years.

Readiris v.14.0 pro ocr for mac