FineReader for ScanSnap isn't nearly as suitable as Acrobat. 1. If your document has writing in two different directions, FineReader will get confused and do an extremely poor OCR job. 2. If your document is skewed, again the OCR isn't as accurate. Neither of these is as much of a problem with Acrobat.

If you select FineReader as the application to run on the scanned document, and you feed a 2nd document while the first is still being OCR'ed, you will get an error on the 2nd document and no OCR. This is true even if you open a new copy of FineReader for each new document.

Neither Acrobat nor FineReader can be configured to do well at scanning a file cabinet of documents and automatically performing OCR without having to manually batch the jobs after you're done scanning. I believe this is intentional on the part of both OCR vendors. Both vendors sell a higher end corporate version that is heavy duty. Users have been clamoring for command line control of Acrobat for years, but I think Adobe is afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive products. If Adobe gave us the ability to OCR a pdf from the command line, our problems would be solved.

My goal is to fully automate OCRing of documents as they are scanned regardless of many or how fast they are scanned. The closest I've come is a set of bash and applescripts. The bash scripts maintain a queue of documents that need to be scanned. They load one document at a time into Acrobat and call an applescript that "tells" Acrobat to OCR. The conversation between the applescript and Acrobat occasionally fails.

I think there are two directions I'll pursue now. Omnipage isn't crippled in this regard and I believe they support monitoring a folder for new pdfs that are saved by your scanner. So they've done the work. I also believe they have one of the best OCR engines. the other direction is a plugin for Acrobat that gives you command line access to batching. This costs as much as Omnipage Pro, so I'm not favoring that solution now.

If someone else has managed to fully automate this so you can scan multiple documents just by pushing the ScanSnap button and end up with an OCR'ed pdf without need to interact with the computer, please get in touch with me. I'm lee@at@salk-dot-edu
-dot-edu

You're not the first person to ask that question recently, so I am going to have a post done on that topic very soon. My initial impressions are no, if the built-in OCR works fine for you then don't worry about it. Keep your eyes open for the post though.

Thanks for all the tips, they're great!

Can you check a few things? Go to System Preferences | Universal Access, and see if “Enable Access for Assistive Devices” is checked. If not, check it.

This is sort of similar, but run /Applications/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility and make sure GUI Scripting is checked.

Give those a try and let me know how it goes.