DocumentSnap

The folks over at Lifehacker are running one of their famous High Five calls for submissions, this time about readers’ favorite OCR tools. OCR tools have been around for decades, but only recently have they been affordable (in many instances free) and accessible to people outside of government and corporate offices. This week we want [...]

If you are a Windows user and already have Microsoft Office XP through 2007, chances are you already have the ability to OCR documents to get the text out of them. It’s called Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI). I’m not going to lie, what I am about to show you is not exactly the best [...]

In the comments to my ScanSnap S1300 review post, user pendolino asked about the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1300‘s performance, not so much the scanner itself, but the software and OCR process afterwards. i would like to know a bit more about the very interesting sounding OCR feature that you say is bundled within the software (both [...]

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 [...]

Sometimes, when you have to scan a large number of documents at once, the step of doing OCR (making the PDF searchable) after each document can really slow things down. It may be preferable to scan them all in and then OCR them all in one big shot. In the past I have posted about [...]

One issue with the Fujitsu ScanSnap and OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard that I forgot to mention the other day is the ABBYY FineReader that comes bundled with it. When scanning with the version of Finereader that ships with the ScanSnap S510M and S1500M, you may get an error message like “File not created with ScanSnap”. [...]

Well, that didn’t take long. Just 13 days after my post about making PDFs searchable before uploading to Evernote, they went ahead and added that feature for Premium users yesterday. Starting now, if you are a premium user and you upload a PDF, Evernote will OCR it on the backend and make it searchable. If [...]

One complaint that people have with the PDFs that Acrobat kicks out when doing OCR, either by doing it manually or via an Acrobat OCR Applescript, is that the files can get really big. There are a few solutions to this, but one of them is to change the PDF Output Style. The default that [...]

Update: Of course, a few days after I posted this, Evernote announced that they would make PDFs searchable for Premium users. So if you are not a Premium user, this will help. Otherwise, just upload away. One of the most popular posts on this site is on how to use the Fujitsu ScanSnap with Evernote. [...]

I have received a number of questions recently about the software that is included with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. For example, why does the ScanSnap come with both Abbyy FineReader and Adobe Acrobat? Aren’t they both for doing OCR? I suspect part of the reason that this question comes up is because of my posts about [...]