I’m scanning in numerous 2-3 page documents. I want to scan in one document (consisting of a couple of pages) and then when that is finished load another document and scan the next document. I’m using the Scan To Folder Option of the Fujitsu software.
I am trying to figure out how I get the documents to scan into the File List in the Preview window (see attached file). At the moment every time I scan I have to enter the document name and hit save. What I want to do is have a number of documents queued up in the File List and then be able to rename them one after another.
I want to do it this way because the Preview window of the “Scan To Folder” option consistently shows the preview of the scanned file at too small a size to read and there doesn’t seem to be any way to save the expanded window size so that the Preview is large enough to be read next time it pops-up.
The attached file should make it clearer what I am trying to do.
I do a lot of scans with my ScanSnap, usually several documents in a session.
I have '‘Set Attributes’ unchecked in Preferences > OCR, as I don’t want to be bothered by that panel popping up and waiting for me to respond. I prefer naming the documents after they have been saved into the database. Most of the time, I select some existing text in the PDF, Control-click and use the contextual menu option, ‘Set Title As’.
I think perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I am scanning the documents in using only the ScanSnap software because at this point I have thousands of pages to scan and name.
My workflow is in batches because I find that I can eliminate a number of wait points if I batch scan (e.g. naming the file, performing OCR etc.)
So my workflow is -
Scan a few hundred pages in using per document groupings.
Rename the scanned documents from 2009_02_03 etc. to something more meaningful. This is the part I’m needing help with.
After all the documents for that day’s batch are scanned I do a Batch OCR using Adobe Acrobat. I set this up to run overnight so I am not wasting time waiting for the OCR to finish on a per document basis.
Next day I batch import the OCR’d documents into DevonThink
Doing it this way I eliminate the wait period for the OCR but finding a good method to go through the scanned documents and enter a good descriptive name is difficult. Any suggestions on improving the workflow?
I was going to ask a similar question, so hope you don’t mind me adding to this thread.
I just installed my ScanSnap S300M and love it! I see I can’t use the ExactScan interface, and it’s installed the DTPO plugin. I can press the button on the SS and it grabs multiple documents, makes them one large PDF. Now how do I split that into smaller ones? I’ve got several two page docs and only see that I can right-click on one single page and then Split document. How do I grab two pages at a time from the bulk document (10 pages) to put them together as five 2 page documents in DTPO?
redacted - I batch process the OCR using Acrobat for two reasons - 1) If I am processing a long document there is some wait time involved if I do it via DTP and 2) Elsewhere on this thread I undertook a comparison on the accuracy of Acrobat OCR vs. Finereader in DTP. Acrobat was consistently better. Since then I believe that the Finereader implementation in DTP has been tweaked to improve accuracy but I haven’t retested it, so I err on the side of caution and go with Acrobat OCR. The batch processing implementation is very good - you just set it running and wake up to a fresh folder of fully OCRd documents.
Having said this I do like the very small sizes that DTP/Finereader comes up with and the nice trick that Bill points out above to use text as title is very handy.
For me the holy grail of this enterprise is to get a super-efficient scanning/OCR/naming/database addition flow. It’s getting closer all the time…
I just received my ScanSnap S300M last night and got it set up.
Firstly, I’m very impressed with this tiny little piece of kit. However, I was under the impression that the S300M would scan to searchable PDF! I seem to be wrong though, as I can’t see any option/preference to achieve this.
I never had that much time to play around with it, but all i could do was scan documents to PDF. I’m running DTP 1.5.4 and was using my old CanoScan LiDE60 for creating searchable PDF’s (albeit crappy ones).
Can someone confirm if the S300M can create searchable PDF’s without any additional software, i.e. DTPO 2?
The S300M can NOT create searchable PDFs out of the box. It doesn’t come with any OCR software. However, you CAN create searchable PDF’s using DTPO/Acrobat Pro (if you have that).
I use DTPO 2.0 and my ScanSnap S300M to create searchable PDFs.
Looks like this will be the “lever” that forces me to upgrade to DTPO2.
Having been using DTP 1.x since 2006, I’m sort of stuck in my ways with that. I’m not (yet) a fan of DTP/O 2’s interface and I’ve no need for the email archiving or the web server functionality doh!
And here was me thinking that I’d just buy myself a much better scanner to make life easier
Colin, why dont you try downloading the software for the Snapscan S1500M? Or see if there is an upgrade to your Snapscan software? I have the 300M at home; traveling now and I’m using my sister’s new S1500M, so I installed that software. World of difference, although I’m awaiting the Fujitsu patch for Snow Leopard (November) that will fix the Scan to Folder glitch. Scan to Folder works but quits as soon as it’s done the job and an error message pops up with a report for Apple. PITA. This is Snow Leopard wide.
I optimise the PDFs after the OCR process since I figure that it can’t hurt to have the maximum available amount of bits available to the OCR process. The batch OCR run then optimises down to a Clearscan and downsamples images (I think I use the 600 option).
I’m interested to hear why you think that the Finereader OCR engine is vastly superior to the Adobe one as that wasn’t borne out by my empirical testing (although I did test them some time ago).
The accuracy is at a stage now that I’m happy to use either the Finereader or Adobe particularly as the DTP software is so good at detecting “near misses” in the OCR results.
I haven’t trying OCR with Acrobat Pro ver 9, not yet. But the FineReader has done a better job of OCRing than Acrobat. With Acrobat, I get huge chunks that it can’t read. I gave up. I only noticed this when I was testing a phrase on a page in front of me and Acrobat didn’t pick it up in a search.
I never get this with FineReader. All of this was going on with docs that were not in DTPO.
