Scanning and document management

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Hi

I am new to this software and forum but have been interested in following the posts on scanning. Thought your readers might be interested in the following account.

I have a Fujitsu Scansnap FI5110-EX scanner. While there is no official English driver for Mac OS X, Fujitsu UK provided me with an English beta which I have been running for 8 months. Works fine in Tiger and Panther. Never had any problems. There is also an official Japanese version downloadable. It does not have TWAIN drivers.

Anyway, the Scansnap scans double sided A4 at 15 ppm (that’s 30ppm if all pages are double sided), deskews pages automatically (so they look good) and pumps out the PDF to any program you want.

I have tried it with DT. I select DT as the program to send the result to. Bingo, when I hit the scan button on the scanner, the scanner scans the pages, cleans them up and they appear automatically in the open database. Just rename the file to whatever makes sense.

I have tried other scanners in the past for personal office/home document management. Nothing comes close to the convenience or speed of the Scansnap. But the Scansnap is no use for large or weird shaped paper (anything up to US/letter/A4 etc is OK - automatically detects paper size).

The only chink in the procedure is OCR. For OCR, I have been using Acrobat Pro to OCR the PDF scans from the Scansnap. Works well but slows down the process considerably and introduces a new step.

My request/hopeful suggestion is for the next version of DT Pro to support the Scansnap range of scanners. Other Macintosh software has direct support for the Scansnap scanners (eg Scantango (see scantango.com/downloads.html) so it has been done before.

Cheers

2

Thanks for the post. I’ve read about this scanner, but you are the first DT/DT Pro user to report on its actual use.

That’s a very impressive scanning speed, although, as you point out, putting OCR into the chain from the scanner to the database would add a step that will be slower than the scanner itself.

Equipment with this capability can not only make the “paperless office” feasible, but help put the information into DT/DT Pro where it can be intelligently searched and analyzed.

3

I am completely new to DT and just purchase the latest version of ScanSnap for the Mac - the best sheet scanner for the Mac - and am interested in making a key element of my “paperless” office. As I am in the discovery phase, I would like to support some of the comments regarding better integration of this product with DT. Again, I am completely new and my comment may be somewhat dated, however, I am researching making DT pro, DayLite along with ScanSnap a key part of my business practice and would appreciate any feedback on perhaps palns to further enable ScanSnap into DT.[/b]
[/quote]