Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

When it rains it pours.  When Fujitsu released their ScanSnap Update For Snow Leopard, the missing piece was the OCR provided by FineReader.  They said it would be released by ABBYY soon, and as of today, it’s out.

The update is for the ScanSnap S1500M and S510M.

Click Here To Download The FineReader Snow Leopard Update. It’s down at the bottom.

You know the deal.. let us know in the comments how the update worked out for you!

Update Nov 13, 2009: The Snow Leopard fix has been released. See this for more information!

Since Apple’s new version of OSX – 10.6 aka Snow Leopard is released today, I thought I’d make this post so that we can share our experience using the Fujitsu ScanSnap with it.

I haven’t found any indication that 10.6 is officially supported by Fujitsu yet, but I have seen mixed reviews online.

Update: Fujitsu has reached out to me and also posted on Twitter via their @ScanSnapIT account the status of Snow Leopard support. For ScanSnap S300M, S500M, S510M, and S1500, scanning is supported on Snow Leopard, but Quick Menu does not work and Scan to Folder currently does not work.

Fujitsu Customer Support has posted this bulletin listing the workarounds and support status. They expect it to be fixed “within 2009″.

This tweet by user @tedlandau makes it look like Snow Leopard is working with the ScanSnap:

However, I also came across this ars technica forum thread saying that at least one user has had problems scanning to PDF using the ScanSnap S510M.

I haven’t tried Snow Leopard myself yet and haven’t heard back from Fujitsu regarding their support for it, but have you had any experiences one way or the other with it? Leave your feedback in the comments.

Update: Just came across another tweet from user @TaxMan45 saying that he chatted with Fujitsu Support and that the ScanSnap 510M is compatible with Snow Leopard, but not in Quick Menu mode.

Update: There is an update from Fujitsu that the Snow Leopard fix will be ready at the end of November.

This one is for the Mac users out there. Anyone who has used Mac OSX, whether they know it or not, has probably used Preview (or as Mac-heads call it, Preview.app) at some point. Any time you double click on an image or PDF, it is probably Preview that is starting up to view it.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Preview has some basic document editing capabilities. I made this quick video to run through them:

One thing I forgot to mention when creating the video is that you can use Preview to annotate documents as well. To do this:

• Go to Tools -> Annotate -> Add Note

• Place the annotation where you want it to go
• In the box, type your message

To summarize, Preview.app can:

• Re-order pages
• Delete pages
• Insert pages
• View one or two pages at a time, alone or continuously
• Go to full-screen mode
• View an index sheet of all pages
• Add notes to annotate a document

Do you have any more document management tips for Preview.app? Leave them in the comments.

In the past I have posted about how to use Japanese ScanSnap drivers, and have posted that the new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M will be cross-platform, but what if you don’t want to mess around with foreign drivers or have an older ScanSnap scanner?

if you have access to a Windows XP CD, there is a free way that you can use your ScanSnap S510 or S300 on your Mac using VirtualBox. (This may even work with Linux too – I’ve never tried).

VirtualBox is a free open source program that will let you run Windows on your Mac. There’s no rebooting required like Boot Camp – you run Windows inside a window in your Mac. This is great not only for the ScanSnap but for any Windows program you may be stuck using.

There are two requirements to do this:

1. You need to have an Intel mac. No Powerbooks or Powermacs, sorry.
2. You need to have access to a Windows XP installation CD

Ready? Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download VirtualBox for OSX hosts

2. Double-click on the downloaded VirtualBox .DMG file and open it up. Then double-click on the VirtualBox.mpkg installer

Follow through all the prompts and click Close when done.

3. In the Applications folder, double click on the VirtualBox application

4. Once VirtualBox starts up, click the New icon

5. Go through the steps of the Wizard. At first, give your new virtual machine a name (you can think of a virtual machine as your new Windows-inside-your-Mac). Give it as much memory as you want but don’t go below the recommendation. For this I stuck with the base 192 Megs but you may want to bump it up if you can.

6. If you are doing this for the first time, chose New for Hard Drive and when you go through the wizard you probably want to choose Dynamic Storage

7. You can leave the name of your new virtual disk as-is and give it whatever you think you need for hard drive space.

8. Hit Finish to end the new virtual disk creation wizard, then Next to choose your new disk, then Finish

9. You’ll now see that the Settings and Start menus are activated. Before we start, we want to enable USB. Click the Settings Icon and then the Ports menu. Click Enable USB Controller.

10. Click OK and then the Green Start arrow

11. You’re going to get a message about it auto-capturing your keyboard. All that is saying is that if you are “in Windows” and you do something like Alt-Tab, it will be doing the Alt-Tab in Windows and not in your Mac. If you don’t want that, just hold down the left Command key. Hit OK.

12. Now it’s time for the First Run Wizard. Pop in your Windows XP CD, choose where it is, and hit Next and Finish if it’s right.

13. Now we get the beautiful blue Windows install screens we know and love. Hit Enter to choose your new Unpartitioned Space and choose to format NTFS. Then let it run.

14. Create a Shared Folder so that your Mac can see documents that your Windows VM has scanned. Click the Shared Folders icon and then Add A Shared Folder.

15. Choose or create a folder and then click Make Permanent and hit OK

16. Before your new shared folder will work, in the top VirtualBox VM menu, choose Devices and then Install Guest Additions. Choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe and follow the prompts

17. Map that new folder to a drive letter, say in this example the Z drive. In Windows Explorer. go to My Network Places, Then Entire Network, then VirtualBox Shared Folders and you should see \\VBOXSVR\Scanned (or whatever you called your new folder). Right click on that and choose Map Network Drive and give it a drive letter.

18. Now it’s time to follow Fujitsu’s instructions for installing your Windows ScanSnap. Don’t plug in your ScanSnap yet but install the software on your Setup CD.

19. Plug in your ScanSnap and turn it on. You will likely find.. nothing happens. Your light on your ScanSnap may blink. You need to tell VirtualBox that you want to enable it first. Click on the Ports icon on the bottom of your VM and choose your scanner from the list of devices.

20. Scan away! Either scan to a folder or using ScanSnap Organizer. Either way, if you want your PDFs to be accessible by the Mac you will probably want to scan them to your drive that you created in step 17.

There we go. It’s really not as complex as this 20 step tutorial may make it sound, but if you give it a try let me know how it goes.

Reader T. Joseph Carter wrote in the following question about using a MacBook Air (with only 1 USB port) and a ScanSnap S300M.

I’m considering a ScanSnap S300M to carry with me–but the laptop I carry is the MacBook Air, which has just one USB port. It’s much higher power than the average USB port (made to power the Superdrive Apple sells for it), but I’m wondering if someone’s managed to get the S300M running off the MacBook Air’s single USB port.

Fujitsu says that it simply requires two USB ports, but the answer sounds suspiciously like a level one support response. I used to have a Palm PDA sync/charge cable that ended in a barrel connector and mini-USB. It wasn’t as good as using the AC adapter, but it worked if you needed to power the thing off USB.

Anyone tried this for the MacBook Air by chance? Can you suggest a good place to ask if not?

Thanks, I’m buried in paper here!

Since the MacBook Air has only a single USB port and since the ScanSnap needs two USB plugins if you are not using the AC adaptor, I am not sure of the best way to get this to work.
Has anyone tried it out or found some creative workaround to get the ScanSnap S300M working with a MacBook Air without the AC adaptor? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Update: It’s confirmed that the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M include both drivers on the install CD. See this ScanSnap Cross-Platform post for more info.  The rest of this post relates to the S510 and s300 series.

According to commenter “rei” on this ScanSnap S1500 post, the next version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap is going to work on both Mac and Windows – the only difference between the S1500 and S1500M is the bundled software.

If that is the case, that will be tremendous, but that doesn’t help you if you have an older ScanSnap for Windows that you want to use on your shiny new Mac.

It is possible to do, but believe it or not you have to hunt down some Japanese drivers to do it.

Here is a roundup of some links that show you how it is done.

The Mac Lawyer has an excellent step by step guide. Make sure you read all the way down through the comments as there are updated links to the driver software there. While the ScanSnap model that Ben is referring to is the 5110EOX2, some commenters have noted that they have got it working with newer ScanSnaps like the S300.

A link in the comments of the Mac Lawyer post led me to the My Punchbowl Blog. Scroll down to #10 in the list for a discussion of how he got the S510 working on his new Mac.

The granddaddy of all cross-platform-ScanSnap information is this MacOSXHints forum thread. It is long and goes on for a wide time period, so you may want to start at the end and work backwards to go by the newest information.

So, while I wouldn’t say getting a Windows ScanSnap working on the Mac is easy, it is clearly do-able. Have you ever “crossed the aisle” and got your ScanSnap working cross-platform? Leave your war story in the comment.

So you’ve finally disabled Quick Menu and you’ve gotten all your ScanSnap Manager Profiles set up. Now you want to make sure that you don’t lose it all.

This will be a two part post, first starting with the Mac. Windows will come soon.

I won’t get too technical, but your settings are stored in something called a Property List file (plist). What you want to do is back up that file and keep it somewhere safe.

Here is where it is:

• In Finder go to your Home directory
• Click on Library
• Click on Preferences
• Scroll down and you will see a bunch of files that start with jp.co.pfu.blah blah blah. The one you want is called jp.co.pfu.ScanSnap. V10L10.plist (that V10L10 might be different for you. Not sure what that signifies exactly)

If you want to see what is in it and you are in Leopard, highlight it and hit the space bar. Quick Look will open up.

Back up that file and you should have your settings saved if disaster strikes. It might even be good for migrating your ScanSnap settings to another machine, though I have not tried that yet.

Let me know if this trick does end up helping some day.

Possibly None

It could be that you already have all the software that you need. If you have a ScanSnap or other scanner, it will come with software to scan and possibly even convert it to a searchable PDF.

It might even come with some simple document management software.

If you have an external backup like a MyBook or a Time Capsule, it might already have software to do backups for you.

However, if you want to “take things to the next level” and have a full document management workflow, there is software out there that can help.

Manage Documents Like A Pro

Mac users are spoiled for choice when it comes to document management software. Here are a few favorites:

DEVONthink Pro Office

DEVONthink is called a “Personal Information Assistant”. There are a number of different flavors, but the one that works best with the ScanSnap is DEVONthink Pro Office.

It manages documents and classifies them and files them automatically, and has very advanced OCR and searching technology .

It automatically takes documents from the ScanSnap and turns them into searchable PDFs.

Yep

Yep is an iPhoto-like file PDF browser that allows you to add tags to documents in order to manage them. It will assign tags based on the folder that they’re stored in, and then you can of course add your own.

PDFPen

PDFPen is a PDF editing solution that lets you add comments, highlighting, signatures, move around pages, and other general document management stuff. It’s kind of like a scaled down Acrobat for 1/6 of the price.

For Windows users one solution is Microsoft OneNote 2007

OneNote is a “digital notebook” that lets you bring in documents, images, media, etc. For documents, it will OCR them and allow you to search through.

Another Windows program is Home Document Manager.  Home Document Manager will scan, organize, and make your documents searchable.

Stay Safe – Backup

There are a ton of backup programs for Windows.

For local backups, SyncBackSE is a favorite.

If you want to go the online route, there is Mozy and Carbonite. Here is more information about online backup solutions.

For Mac, OSX Leopard comes with built in backup software called Time Machine. You can use that with any external hard drive, or use a Time Capsule.

The online route for Mac users is a bit more limited, but Mozy is an extremely popular choice. The best part is that the first 2 Gigs of storage is free.

Do you have any other software for managing paper and documents that you can’t live without? Sound off in the comments.