DocumentSnap

How To Scan Large Multipage Documents With The Fujitsu ScanSnap

Brooks — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:46:53 +0000

The Fujitsu ScanSnap‘s Automatic Document Feeder is great for taking a stack of documents and ripping through it, but what do you do when the document you want to scan has more pages than the feeder can hold?

This is particularly an issue with the ScanSnap S1300, which can only hold 10 sheets at a time.

It turns out it’s not a huge problem at all. You just need to make one change to your ScanSnap Manager profile.

Right click on the ScanSnap icon in your Dock or System Tray and choose Settings (or Scan Button Settings on Windows).

Then go to the Scanning tab. You’ll see a checkbox that says Continue scanning after current scan is finished. Check that and hit Apply.

Now, when you stack of documents in the feeder and hit the scan button, after it finishes it will prompt you to add more pages. If you’re done the document, hit Finish Scanning. Otherwise, add more pages into the feeder and hit Continue Scanning.

If you scan a lot of large documents, it may be worth your while to create a special ScanSnap Manager profile just for this. Otherwise, you can just change the setting when you need it (or leave it checked all the time if you don’t mind the Finished Scanning box coming up every time).

(Photo: FeatheredTar)

A Candystore For DIY Book Scanning

Brooks — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:07:59 +0000

You may remember that a few months ago I did a how to make a $20 book scanner post.

What I did not know then, but I do now thanks to awesome DocumentSnap reader Luke from Australia, is that there is a whole vibrant community around building and using DIY book scanners.

The main site is diybookscanner.org, which has pictures of members’ projects.

They have a blog with the latest news, but all the action happens in the DIY Book Scanner Forum.

In the forum there are discussions about building your own book scanner, but also a bunch of helpful threads on free/open source OCR software, iPhones, camera settings, etc.

ScanTailor

I will probably be doing a post on this software alone someday, but it appears that most of the DIY types are using a free application called Scan Tailor (for latest updates about Scan Tailor, check out the section in the DIY Forum).

There is a Windows build of Scan Tailor on the Sourceforge site, along with instructions on building it yourself for Linux or OSX. (Update: there is a Mac build you can download in the forum thread).

It looks pretty fantastic if you want to be serious about scanning in your books.

I love these open source/hacker-y communities. If you have any interest in book scanning, I definitely recommend DIY Book Scanner out.

(Photo by adampadsadam)

How To Leave OfficeDrop (Not That You’d Want To)

Brooks — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:00:30 +0000

When using an online service for going paperless, the ability to get your stuff out of the system is as important as what you can do in the system.

You don’t want a situation where you upload all your documents somewhere and then if you decide to leave the service, you can’t.

Recently I wrote about how to export your data out of Evernote, and now OfficeDrop, an online scanning and digital filing system, has written a blog post outlining how to get your data out should you choose to.

Whether you are cancelling your account or just need to get your documents out of our cloud and onto your desktop, there are 3 easy ways to move your files from OfficeDrop to your computer. As always, no matter how you download your documents, they will always retain their text-searchable PDF format.

You can read the blog post for more information, but the three options they currently provide are:

Download the documents
Request a DVD copy of your account
Request a link to a zip file of your account contents that you can download (this happens automatically if you cancel).

I really like companies being upfront about how to cancel and get your stuff out rather than hiding it. Nice work OfficeDrop.

Lifehacker OCR Call For Votes

admin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:17:31 +0000

The folks over at Lifehacker are running one of their famous High Five calls for submissions, this time about readers’ favorite OCR tools.

OCR tools have been around for decades, but only recently have they been affordable (in many instances free) and accessible to people outside of government and corporate offices. This week we want to hear about your favorite OCR tool and what features make it so good at converting hard-copy print into machine-readable and editable text.

So, if you have a favorite program (or want to see what others are suggesting), head on over and have your say.

(Photo by: Laineys Repetoire)

Bletchley Park Putting History Online

Brooks — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:55:03 +0000

So you think you have a big scanning project to do.

Ever since reading the books Cryptonomicon and Enigma, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Bletchley Park, the site of British codebreaking activities during World War II.

Of course like many important historic sites, it has suffered from years of financial neglect and has millions of secret documents that have literally sat there for decades.

Hewlett-Packard heard about Bletchley’s plight and has donated scanners and staff to digitize the records and put them online.

He said since the archive is so big nobody knows exactly what each individual document stored there contains.

However, the information they expect to dig out will definitely include communication transcripts, communiques, memoranda, photographs, maps and other material relating to key events that took place during the war.

He said: “We have many boxes full of index cards, which have lots of different messages on them. But this will be our chance to follow a trail and put the messages together so we can find out what they really mean.

I love hearing about these massive scanning projects, especially when it is for historical purposes.

Most interesting to me is how they are already filling in gaps based on the documents they have gone through so far. For example, how “countries such as Spain, Switzerland and Sweden were perhaps not as neutral as they were portrayed.” Innnnteresting.

Do you have any other examples of big historic scanning projects? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Summarize Text Using Mac OSX Summarize Or Microsoft Word AutoSummarize

Brooks — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:24:54 +0000

Whether you are wanting to create an executive summary for a document, or you just want to get the gist of a long document before diving in, wouldn’t it be helpful if your computer could do the skimming for you?

The Mac OSX operating system and Microsoft Word on Windows have little-known summarizing tools that can do a pretty decent job of giving you the key points of a document or block of text.

In the examples below, I will use a PDF copy of the free 4 Ways To Tame Your Documents e-Book that you can get by signing up for the free Paper Sanity e-Course or my weekly Paper Cuts newsletter.

Mac OSX Summarize Service

Sometimes there are hidden features in the nooks and crannies of the OSX operating system, and Summarize Text is one of them. However, before I show you how to use it, we have to check if it is set up first.

Do You Have Summarize Enabled?

Open up a searchable PDF in Preview, a text file in a text editor, or a website in Safari.

Highlight some text and go to the Services menu. In this example in Preview I will go to Preview and then Services. Do you see Summarize in the list like this screenshot? If not, you’re going to have to enable it.

Enabling Summarize

From that same Preview (or whichever app you are in) > Services menu, click Services Preferences.

In the right pane, scroll way down to the bottom of the Text section and you should see Summarize there. Check it to enable.

Summarize It!

Back in whatever application you were just using, highlight the text you want to summarize or Select All if you want to do the whole document.

Right click on the text, and you should see Summarize (it may be buried in a Services submenu). Click it and it will open up the Summary application.

Your text will now be summarized, but it doesn’t stop there. By default it shrinks it by about 50%.

You can move the slider to make it bigger or smaller, so you can go way down to 1-5% and get a super short summary.

But you will probably get the best results at around the 25-30% mark.

Once you have things how you like them, you can either read the text there in the Summary application, copy & paste the text out, or save it as an RTF file.

AutoSummarize In Microsoft Word for Windows

While Windows users don’t have this functionality built into the operating system (as far as I know), a similar function does come included in Microsoft Word (at least in 2003 and 2007).

I was going to write a tutorial for you, but this AutoSummarize video by Microsoft pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

I can see myself using text summarization when I have a long document to read and I want to get the key points before digging in. How about you? Leave a note in the comments if you think this feature would (or wouldn’t be) useful and how you’d use it.

(Photo: visual.dichotomy)

Fujitsu ScanSnap: How Are The S1300 and ScanSnap S1500 Models Different?

Brooks — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:03:12 +0000

I get asked this question quite a bit: “What is the difference between the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 and the ScanSnap S1500 series?”, and then the logical followup: “Which should I buy?”.

I decided to put together this blog post for me to point people to, so here is a rundown of the differences between the ScanSnap models.

Speed

S1500/S1500M: Up to 20 pages per minute
S1300: Up to 8 pages per minute

Clearly the S1500 series has the edge here. If you are doing a large amount of scanning, you will probably want to go with the S1500 or S1500M.

Capacity

S1500/S1500M: Maximum 50 sheets
S1300: Maximum 10 sheets

Again, the S1500 is a pretty clear winner. If you are regularly scanning more than 10 sheets at a time, you will probably want to pick up the S1500 or S1500M. Otherwise, the limited capacity of the S1300 is going to get pretty annoying.

Size/Weight

S1500/S1500M: 11.5 x 6.3 x 6.2 in. (292 x 159 x 158 mm). 6.62 lb (3.0 kg).
S1300: 11.18 in. x 3.90 in. x 3.03 in. (284mm x 99mm x 77mm). 3.08 lb. (1.4kg).

Both versions of the ScanSnap are compact, and I am not sure that this category has a “winner” per se, but the S1300 is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the S1500 series.

Operating System

The S1500 is designed for Microsoft Windows. However, it does include Mac OSX drivers and can be used to scan on a Mac. It does not include the extra software (including OCR software) for Mac.

The S1500M is designed for Mac OSX. However, it does include Windows drivers and can be used to scan on a PC. It does not include the extra software (including OCR software) for Windows.

Fujitsu is calling the S1300 their first “hybrid scanner”. It is designed to be used both on Windows and the Mac, and comes with all the software for both.

Included Software

The ScanSnap S1500 includes the following software:

ScanSnap Organizer
Adobe Acrobat 9 for Windows
CardMinder 4.0
ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap

The ScanSnap S1500M includes the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8 for Mac
CardIris 3.6
ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap

The ScanSnap S1300 includes the following software:

ScanSnap Organizer (Windows only)
CardMinder 4.1 (Windows only)
ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap (Windows and Mac)
CardIris 3.6 (Mac only)

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice right off the bat that the S1300 does not include Adobe Acrobat. That may or may not make the price difference worth it to you.

Mobility

While I wouldn’t call the S1500 or S1500M a big scanner, it is clearly not as mobile as the S1300.

Aside from size and weight, the ScanSnap S1300 has the ability to run off a USB port’s power, so you theoretically don’t even need to take your power adapter with you.

Color

Come on, don’t pretend that the look of your peripheral isn’t important.

The ScanSnap S1500 has a black and silver look, while the S1500M is a more Mac-y white and grey.

With the release of the hybrid S1300, Fujitsu decided to go with the S1500′s color scheme. Bye bye white!

Of course, there is always the lacquer option too.

Other Goodies

The ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M come with a carrier sheet, so you can more easily scan odd-sized paper.

So Which Is Better?

I bet you know what I am going to say here: It depends!

If you have a large and/or regular volume of paper, I strongly urge you to go for the ScanSnap S1500 or the ScanSnap S1500M. The extra speed and paper capacity will save you lots of time.

If you have a need to be mobile, or if you do only a small amount of scanning, you can probably get away with the ScanSnap S1300.

The right model of ScanSnap for you really depends on your needs. As Apu said to Mr. Burns, “Just look into your heart, and you will find the answer.”

How To Combine PDF Files On Microsoft Windows For Free

Brooks — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:55:29 +0000

Recently I wrote about how to combine PDF files using Mac OSX, so today I’d like to give Windows the same treatment.

Of course, there are a huge number of applications out there that will do this, and if I had any brains I’d point you to some expensive one that would get me a referral fee.

However I never claimed to be smart, so like the Mac tutorial, I am going to point you to some free and open source ways to do this.

In the Mac tutorial, I limited myself to exclusively using functionality that was part of the operating system. I couldn’t find the equivalent in Windows, so if I have missed something obvious please let me know in the comments.

With all that said, let’s check out two free and open source ways to combine PDFs in Microsoft Windows: PDF Split and Merge and pdftk.

PDF Split and Merge

PDF Split and Merge (aka PDFsam) is a Java application that comes in two versions: basic (free) and enhanced (requires forum membership and a donation of at least 1 Euro).

As the name implies, the application can do a number of PDF manipulation functions including splitting and (wait for it) merging. We’re going to focus on the merging part.

I don’t know what it is with open source software, but 9 times out of 10 the terminology/workflow that they use isn’t intuitive at all to a civilian.

To start with, you need to chose a Plugin. So, we’re going to choose the Merge/Extract plugin.

Then we’ll click the Add button and add the files that we want to combine (click the image to make it bigger). You then have a chance to change the order if you’d like.

Once you have your files how you want them, go down to the bottom of the screen and either type or hit Browse to select your destination file/folder.

When you are ready to roll, hit the Run button. When it finishes, you will have the combined PDF file.

pdftk

If working in the command line is more your style, pdftk is definitely for you. I love their description of it:

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

pdftk can do a whole assortment of PDF tools, but again we’ll be focusing on merging documents.

It’s pretty simple. Download pdftk, unzip the .exe file somewhere, go to the directory where your documents are, and issue a command similar to this:

pdftk Scan.pdf Scan1.pdf cat output Combinedpdftk.pdf

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Et voila, here is the output:

I could have also just thrown everything together into one PDF:

pdftk *.pdf cat output Combinedpdftk.pdf

As you can see, pdftk is a pretty powerful little application that [can do a lot more than what I have described here][6]. I’ll be writing more on it in the future.

So, these have been two free ways to combine PDFs on Windows. Do you have another method that you like? Let us know in the comments.

Amazon Releases A New Kindle, Does Anyone Care?

Brooks — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:40:19 +0000

Once upon a time there was a device called the Amazon Kindle, and people loved it. Really loved it. They wouldn’t stop talking about what a great device it was.

Then a bunch of smaller manufacturers made cheap e-Readers that, let’s face it, were nowhere close to the Kindle.

Then along came big bad Steve Jobs and he released a little thing called the iPad. People loved it, really loved it. They wouldn’t stop talking about what a great device it was.

The poor old Kindle started looking a little cast aside. Not too many people were talking about it anymore.

What did Amazon decide to do? They decided to go for the best of both worlds: make a better Kindle and sell it at a price that makes the cheap e-Readers not make any sense to buy.

As you may or may not know, Amazon has released a new Kindle. The screen is the same size but the device itself is smaller (by 21%) and lighter (by 15%) compared to the old Kindle. Here’s a size comparison shot:

They have also added the E-ink display from the Kindle DX, so the contrast is much better.

There are some other changes, but the biggest news is, of course, the price. It is $189 US for the 3G Kindle, but Amazon has also released a Wi-Fi only Kindle for $139.

If you don’t care about having 3G, $139 is a pretty crazy price for an e-Reader of this quality.

My question is, however, has the iPad stolen the Kindle’s mojo for good? Or is the reading experience on the Kindle so much better that it’s in a class of its own and the iPad doesn’t matter? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

(By the way, I guess the fact that the device is sold out and waiting-list only on Amazon kind of answers my question. Someone out there is snapping these things up).

How To Combine PDF Files in Mac OSX Using Automator To Make A Service

Brooks — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:38:42 +0000

A close friend of mine is currently doing a year long round-the-world trip. Being the sucker nice guy that I am, I have agreed to receive her mail and keep her important documents for her.

Sometimes I have situations where I need to scan stuff for her and send them electronically. Usually my trusty ScanSnap S1300 does the job, but there is the occasional situation where I have to use my flatbed.

However, what happens when I have multiple PDFs that really should go in one document? I needed a way to combine the PDFs together.

There are a million ways to do this, including some I have talked about before like using Preview.app to drag and drop pages, and there are lots of applications that one can use to combine PDFs, but I wanted to do something that would be:

Already built into the OS and not require any additional software
Easy to use
Repeatable so I only have to set it up once and can use it again and again

I came across this great tutorial by George Harito that runs through how to use Automator to create a Service in Snow Leopard to combine PDFs for you. If you don’t know what the heck that means, don’t worry about it. I’ll take you through step by step.

(In case you’re wondering why I don’t just point to George’s tutorial and be done with it, it’s because there are some extra unneeded steps in there that might confuse some people, so I decided to recreate it here. The inspiration comes from George though and he deserves all the credit).

Create The Service

We’re going to be using an application called Automator to set this up. It looks a bit scary but don’t worry, what we’ll be doing is very easy.

Start Automator

In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator, the cool little robot icon

Choose Service

In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose

Set Up The PDF Action

At the top in the middle, you will see a line that says Service receives selected and then a dropdown. Choose PDF files

In the Library section on the left, you’ll see a line for PDF. Choose that
In the next column over, there is an option for Combine PDF Pages. Click that and drag it into the the section on the right

Now we want to be able to give our new PDF a name.

Go to the Library section and choose Files & Folders and drag Rename Finder Items to the canvas under your Combine PDF Pages
It is going to ask you this: This action will change the names of the Finder items passed into it. Would you like to add a Copy Finder Items action so that the copies are changed and your originals are preserved?. You almost certainly want to hit Don’t Add because you want it to rename the file, not make a copy.
We want to totally rename the file, so choose Name Single Item
At the bottom, click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. It will then prompt you for a name for your new PDF when you run it.

So now we’ve told it to combine the PDFs and give it a name, but now we need to tell it where to put the new file.

In the Library, still in Files & Folders, drag Move Finder Items to the canvas under your previous action
You can leave the default location if you want, but click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. That way, it will ask you where you want to save your new PDF.

Here is the whole rule. Click to embiggen.

Awesome! You’re done. Now go File | Save As and give it a name like Combine PDF Files.

Using the Service

So why did we go through all this trouble to set it up as a Service?

Now any time I ever want to combine a bunch of PDFs, I just need to go to Finder, right click them, and check out the new option that I have:

When I choose Combine PDFs, I get a popup where I give it a name.

Then, another popup appears where I choose where it save it.

Et voila, I have my combined PDF with the 3 files that I had selected in the Finder.

From now on it will be super easy to combine any PDFs.

How about you?

What tricks/processes do you have for combining PDFs on the Mac? Leave a note in the comments or on the Facebook page.