Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

We’ve written a few times here on DocumentSnap about Pixily, a document management and scanning service that will let you physically send your paper documents and upload them to their service, and then securely manage the scanned files online.

We’ve just gotten word that they have changed their name to OfficeDrop. Why did they change it?

We decided to change our name because we found that customers were having problems spelling and remembering the Pixily name. Additionally, we wanted to find a label that helps potential customers understand what we do. We are obviously very attached to the Pixily brand, so this name change is not something that we took lightly. If you are curious, we will be posting articles on our blog talking about how we came up with OfficeDrop and the process we went through to find a new name.

As of now, not much else is changing other than the name. All web addresses should redirect, but if you run into any problems, email them at [email protected] or phone them at 1-888-674-6493.

What do you think of the new name? Is OfficeDrop better/worse/indifferent than Pixily?

As many of you know, in 2008 I posted an Applescript that will use Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs searchable using Acrobat’s OCR capabilities.

In the comments to that post, user nodis pointed out that adding 2 words to one of the lines can make the PDFs quite a bit smaller.

In my testing, I ran a 1.3 MB PDF through the script. Before nodis’ change, the resulting PDF was 1.7 MB. After the change, it was 424K!

Here is the updated script:

OCRIt-Acrobat – Droplet to batch OCR PDFs in Adobe Acrobat

To use it:

• Download and uncompress the file and save it to your Desktop, Dock or wherever
• Drag one or more PDFs onto the icon
• Enjoy

Let me know how it works out for you and if you see similar reductions in file size.

Update: If you use Acrobat X, please see this post about OCR AppleScript for Acrobat X.

Well, it’s official – the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 has been announced and much like Eddie Murphy, it is coming to America.

You might remember a while ago I saw it on Amazon Japan and posted about it. Well, now no need to wait for it to come to the US. It’s announced. I don’t see it on online stores yet, but I will update when I see it.

I will have a full review coming very soon, but lets get the important stuff out of the way:

• Yes, it is a replacement for the S300 and S300M. The 300 series is dead. Long live the 1300!
• Notice there is no 1300M. This is intentional – for the first time, Fujitsu is releasing what they call a “hybrid” – a device that includes everything for both Mac and PC.

Form Factor of S300 With Features Of S1500

The S1300 takes some of the features of the ScanSnap S1500 like:

• Long Documents: This is huge and you might recall me complaining about it before with the S300M. It will now scan receipts etc. up to 34 inches long
• Searchable Keywords: You can now mark with a highlighter and embed searchable keywords in a document
• Auto Quality: You can choose Auto for Image Quality and if you scan a small document, it will adjust automatically
• More Profiles: You can now set up 20 profiles instead of the previous limit of 12
• Searchable PDFs On The Mac: Yes!!!!!!!!!! This was the biggest limitation of the S300M. The ScanSnap S1300 will now make PDFs searchable out of the box.

Software Included

Fujitsu has included most of the software you’d expect with some extras for Mac users over the S300M. It doesn’t come with Acrobat like it’s big cousins the S1500 and S1500M.

PC and Mac:

• ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap: Does OCR and makes PDFs searchable
• ScanSnap Manager: The main software for the scanner which controls the 1 button operation and enables all the profiles.

PC only:

• ScanSnap Organizer 4.1: Document manager
• CardMinder 4.1: Business card scanning/extraction
• Scan To Functions: Allows you to scan to a folder, email, printer, SharePoint, etc.

Mac only:

• Scan To Functions: Can scan to the usual stuff but also to iPhoto or iDisk
• CardIris 3.6: Business card scanning/extraction

Additional Specs

From a tech perspective, the S1300 is pretty similar to the 300 series.

It scans 8 pages per minute and will hold up to 10 pages, it has auto deskew/orientation, blank page detection, and can (of course) be powered by USB.

It is very very slightly bigger than the 300 series (11.18 x 3.9 x 3.03 in. for the S1300 vs. 11.18 x 3.74 x 3.03 in. for the S300) and is the same weight (3.08 lb.)

As I said, I will be posting my review very soon, but on paper anyways the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 looks like a great upgrade to the 300 series, especially for Mac users (adding searchable PDF is killer!).

What do you think? Anything you are particularly excited about or wish was there? Sound off in the comments.

As much of a paperless geek that I am, I normally wouldn’t sit and watch a video of someone scanning and shredding paper.

However, I just wanted to point you to this YouTube video by user allenday. He’s got a really cool setup of a ScanSnap S300M, Adobe Acrobat, a Mac Mini, a wall-mounted Sharp Aquos, the Royal PX1000MX to shred, and uploads everything to Evernote.

To do the OCRing, he uses the Acrobat OCR Applescript Droplet that I hacked/posted about earlier.

Very cool setup, thanks for sharing allenday! Do any of you have a cool paperless setup? Feel free to share pics or videos in the comments.

So you read all this great stuff about how the Fujitsu ScanSnap is awesome and creates searchable PDFs, and you’re on a Mac and want a portable scanner, so you drop the cash on a ScanSnap S300M.

Then you get it home and find out – wait a minute – the S300M doesn’t come with OCR software! If you’ve been there (and I have), hopefully this post will help you out, as I get a lot of questions about this.

Mail-In Rebate

Your local Fujitsu website may provide a mail-in rebate for OCR software if you purchase the S300M. At the time of this writing, the US Fujitsu websites has a mail-in rebate for a free copy of ReadIris OCR software

The rebate is at http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peripherals/scanners/rebates.html . Check if your country has something similar.

Acrobat

While the S300M doesn’t come with Adobe Acrobat, if you have a copy of it laying around, or have access to it, you can use the ScanSnap with it. Here is an example of how I use the S300M with Acrobat 8.

Evernote

Evernote Premium allows users to upload PDFs and they will be automatically OCR’ed and made searchable.

DevonThink

If you use a program like Devonthink Pro Office to manage your documents, they will be made searchable.

NeatWorks

NeatWorks is a software that is bundled with the NeatDesk scanner, but it can be purchased on its own. See this post for how to use NeatWorks with the Fujitsu ScanSnap.

These are some ideas for how to make searchable PDFs with the ScanSnap S300M. Do you have any others? Leave a message in the comments.