How To Create Searchable PDFs With The ScanSnap S300M

How To Create Searchable PDFs With The ScanSnap S300M

scansnap300m.jpg 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.

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 3 comments

Eric - January 7, 2011 Reply

PDFPen is terrific, has OCR and is very reasonably priced for its feature set. Highly recommend.

    Brooks Duncan - January 7, 2011 Reply

    Thanks for bringing up PDFPen. Great tool all around. We just did a PDFPen giveaway a while ago and hope to do it again sometime.

brandon - February 3, 2010 Reply

I know the title of this post is how to create searchable pdfs, but since I didn't have a free way to do this, I just scan into evernote as an image file and this gives me OCR for free.

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