Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

If you are a Mac user, you probably know that the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, has been released today via the Mac App Store. As I have done with Lion and the fun that was Snow Leopard, I am providing this post as a way to share our experience with the Fujitsu ScanSnap on Mountain Lion. Is it working OK for you?

ScanSnap Mountain Lion Compatibility

I haven’t been able to find a general ScanSnap Mountain Lion page, but there is one for each model. Here’s what I’ve found:

• ScanSnap S1500/S1500M: Supported. See this page and/or instructions below.
• ScanSnap S1300/S1300i: Supported. See this page and/or instructions below.
• ScanSnap S1100: Supported. See this page and/or instructions below.
• ScanSnap S510M: Will be supported by the end of July. See this page and/or instructions below.
• ScanSnap S300M: Will be supported by the end of July. See this page and/or instructions below.

Preparing Your ScanSnap For OS X Mountain Lion

If you have an S1500, S1500M, S1300i, S1300, or S1100, the best way to go is to do an online update.

To do that:

• Make sure ScanSnap Manager is running
• Go to Help > Online Update
• Follow the instructions

If you want to see this in video form, I’ve created a short video.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

If for whatever reason you can’t online update, this Fujitsu page has the drivers for manual installation.

ABBYY FineReader and CardIris

It looks like the new security restrictions in Mountain Lion can cause ABBYY and CardIris to have a problem when updating to new versions. This Fujitsu page has a workaround.

Adobe Acrobat

I haven’t been able to find anything specific on Acrobat 9, but the comments on this Roaring Apps page do not make me hopeful. If you have any information, please leave it in the comments.

Your Experience?

I am not going to have a chance to install Mountain Lion for a bit. How is it working for you with your ScanSnap, both the scanner and the included software?

I’d appreciate it if you left a comment either way. I’ll update this post as new information becomes available.

I have written a number of times about the built-in Preview in Mac OS X (or Preview.app to Mac nerds). It is a pretty great tool for working with paperless documents, and the price (free) doesn’t hurt either.

With the release of Lion, Apple has a cool new feature that is relevant to us paperless types – the ability to capture and use your signature (hat tip to awesome DocumentSnap reader Ron who told me about this way back before I had Lion installed).

You know the drill. You download or receive a PDF form, and you have to print it, sign it, scan it (or worse, fax it), and send it back.

That isn’t as bad of a workflow as it used to be, and I’ve written a few times (here and here for example) about how you can do that. However, the Lion Preview update makes it so that you don’t even need a scanner. Here is how it works.

Capture Your Signature

Fire up Preview and hit the Annotations button on the toolbar (the one that looks like a pen).

Then hit the Signature button, and choose Create Signature from FaceTime Camera (Built-in)…

I suspect that if you have an external camera hooked up you could use that too, but I haven’t tried that myself.

Then grab a piece of paper and write your signature. I have found that using thicker ink (like a gel pen) works best, but ballpoint will probably be fine.

You will feel like a bit of a goof doing this, but hold up the piece of paper to your Mac’s camera. Move it closer until your signature is taking up the box and the bottom is touching the blue line (don’t worry about the fact that your signature looks backwards).

Once it is touching the blue line, you’ll see a preview of what your signature will look like. Pretty cool right?[1]

When it looks good, hit Accept.

Use Your Signature

That’s great that Preview can capture your signature, but what can you do with it?

For starters, when you click on the Signature button in the Annotations toolbar, you should now see your captured signature like this:

To use it, click on your signature and then move the mouse cursor to the signature line in your PDF. Click, and you’ll see your signature there on the page.

Use the mouse cursor to move the signature to just the right place, and you can click and drag on the the circles around the edge of the signature to resize it.

When you have it the way that you like it, hit the Annotations button again and the circles will be gone. Your signature is now in the document.

My Thoughts

You can, of course, use this for anything else you can capture with your camera, not just signatures. Be creative and come up with other ideas.

One possible downside of Lion’s implementation of this feature is that it is black & white only. If you want to capture your signature in, say, blue pen, you’ll want to use another tool. I use PDFPen for that personally.

How about you? Do you “sign” your documents with a scanned signature? How do you do it?

This video on password protecting PDFs is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Sometimes you have a PDF that you want to keep from prying eyes. If you have a Mac, the Preview.app that comes with OS X has password protection functionality built in.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

Back in July, Mac OS X Lion was released, and Fujitsu was ahead of the curve and had already released Lion ScanSnap drivers.

Most things were working fine, with the exception of CardIris, the business card app that ships with ScanSnap scanners.

It looks like Fujitsu has now posted the CardIris for ScanSnap Update as of the end of August, and you can download it here.

I haven’t tried it yet, so feel free to let us know your experience in the comments positive or negative.

Update:
Some (all?) users have reported a problem saving cards even after applying the Lion update. Awesome DocumentSnap reader Fred contacted IRIS support, and this is how they responded:

Here is the link to download the Intel based 3.6.6 software which is updateable and will install on Lion. You can then download and install the 4.0.13 update. If you have a problem with the download then use Firefox, available at www.mozilla.com to download the software, Safari may cause an incomplete or corrupt download.

Fujitsu – CI3.6.6
ftp://ftp02.irislink.com/support/irisusa/CPMy-24v7IbQ/LLN/MAC/CI/ScanSnap/cd08n213_3.6.6.dmg

Fujitsu – Update 4.0.13 – If needed
http://www.irislink.com/CI5v10.7

This video on Cover Flow is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

If you are on a Mac and want to process your documents without using extra software, Cover Flow can be a really handy feature. I believe I first picked up this tip from Paperless Document Organization Guide interviewee Alex Satrapa, but it has also been covered in this paperless workflow forum post by DocumentSnap reader Harry.

As a bonus, I also threw in an example of using TextExpander and Hazel

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

If there was some way to find out what the most used non-Apple app on my iPhone and iPad is, it would almost certainly be Instapaper by Marco Arment. I am either saving or reading articles in there every single day.

Between my Instapaper use and listening to the Build and Analyze podcast, I spend a possibly disturbing amount of time each week either listening to Marco’s voice or interacting with his work.

It was for this reason that I thrilled when he linked to my PDFPen OCR AppleScript post on his blog, Marco.org.

Besides the DocumentSnap link, his post Mac software to add searchable text to scanned PDFs is a great rundown of the different options for performing Optical Character Recognition on the Mac.

As part of my workflow, which isn’t very interesting, I’d like OCR software to recognize the text in scanned documents and embed it under the page images in their PDF files. With the text embedded, I can search the documents with Spotlight and attempt to organize them more easily.

If you are looking for OCR software for your Mac, it is worth taking a look at Marco’s post for his conclusion.

Myself, I am going to take a closer look at PDF OCR X for a future post. DocumentSnap reader Drew has had good results as he reported in this forum thread.

Do you have any OCR software to add? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by Tom T)

I have posted about how the Fujitsu ScanSnap is ready for Lion, but what about some of the other popular scanners for going paperless? What is their status on Mac OS X Lion? Let’s find out.

NeatDesk

It looks like NeatDesk for Mac has been updated for Lion. You need to make sure you have at least NeatWorks for Mac 3.5.4 and you should be good to go.

Canon imageFORMULA P-150

I haven’t seen any reports of the Canon P-150 not working on Lion, but when I go to Canon’s Mac Compatibility list or the P-150 product page, I don’t see Lion support or any drivers available. Do you have a P-150? Please leave a note in the comments and let us know how it is going.

Update: Reader Toralf pointed out that the Lion drivers have been posted as of 11/15/2011. You can download them here.

Doxie

Doxie, according to this forum post is fully compatible with Lion. Make sure you grab version 1.4 of the Doxie software.

Epson GT-S50

Like the Canon, the Epson GT-S50 doesn’t actually list Lion drivers on their drivers page, but when you go through the Lion wizard thing for the scanner, it takes you to this page, which explains how to get updated Lion drivers. If you use the Epson GT-S50 on Lion, please leave a note in the comments with how it is going.

That’s a roundup of four of the most common scanners that DocumentSnap users use. If you use another one, let us know in the comments how the upgrade has gone for your scanner.

(Photo by Tambako The Jaguar)

If you use a Mac, I am sure that you know that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has been released today via the Mac App Store. Similar to what I did with Snow Leopard and Windows 7, I thought I’d put this post up so that you can share your experiences with the Fujitsu ScanSnap.  How is it working for you?

I recently posted about how to prepare your ScanSnap for Lion, so give that a read. Looks like the ScanSnap S1500M, the S1300, and the S1100 should be good to go now, but older models will be ready at the end of August.

I just returned from vacation last night so I am in catchup mode, so I haven’t had a chance to install Lion yet. How is your ScanSnap working on Lion, both the scanner itself and the software that comes with it? Leave a note in the comments or forum and let us know. I’ll update this post as new information becomes available.

Update: Fujitsu has released the Lion drivers for the ScanSnap S300M, S510M, S500M, fi-5110EOXM. You can download them here.

Update 9/19/2011: Fujitsu has released an update for CardIris. You can download it here.

If you are using a Mac, you may have decided to be security conscious and store your documents in an encrypted sparse bundle.

This is a secure disk image that you create on your computer, and to simplify a great deal, you treat it like a drive and save documents and other files to it. You need a secret password to open it, and if someone gets a hold of your computer, they can’t get at your documents unless they know the password.

Some readers have run into problems whereby the contents of their sparse bundle is not being indexed by Spotlight. This is a problem if you want to be able to search the contents of your searchable PDF documents or tags, and is especially a problem if you use something like Yep that relies on Spotlight to find your files.

Awesome DocumentSnap reader Mark ran into this problem and worked with Ironic Software support to find the solution. He was kind enough to share it with me, so I am posting it here in case anyone else is running into it.

To fix it, you need to manually tell Spotlight to index your sparse bundle. It’ll take some Terminal-fu, but it is not too bad.

1. Mount your sparse bundle
2. Open Terminal either by going to Spotlight and typing Terminal or by navigating to /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
3. In the Terminal window, type the following: mdutil -i on, then a space, and then either type the path to your Sparse bundle or just drag and drop its icon into the Terminal Window.
4. Hit Enter and it should hopefully say Indexing Enabled

For example, here is what my Terminal window command looks like:

If you find that Spotlight isn’t finding the contents of your Encrypted Sparse bundle the way that you think it should, give this a try.

(Photo by oskay)

Some time ago, I posted an article about how to use NeatWorks for Mac with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. In case you don’t know, NeatWorks is the software that comes with the NeatDesk and NeatReceipts scanner. Neatco sells the Mac version separately (though not the Windows version for some strange reason).

At the time, I was using a ScanSnap S300M and the latest desktop scanner was the S510M. Since then, I have had a lot of people ask if NeatWorks will work with newer ScanSnaps such as the ScanSnap S1500, the ScanSnap S1300, or the ScanSnap S1100.

The strange thing is, apparently if you ask, Neat is telling people that only the S510M and S300M are officially supported and newer ScanSnaps probably won’t work.

That sounded wacky to me, so I decided to try it out using the exact same profile that I had created back in that original post.

First I tried scanning to NeatWorks with my S1300:

Then I tried with a S1100:

In both cases the scanning appears to have worked fine.

Keep in mind that it seems to be Neat’s official position that it won’t work, so you are probably not going to get any help from them doing this, so caveat emptor.

Anyone run into any problems using NeatWorks with their newer ScanSnap?