Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

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?

Join the forum discussion on this post

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)

Sometimes, especially when you are a doing a big OCR project, you might want to find all the PDFs that are not searchable. That is to say, you want to find the PDFs that have not been OCR-ed.

It turns out that this is not as easy as you might think. Here are a few ways to “sort of” do it. As much as possible I wanted to limit this to search capabilities built into the operating system, or to applications that you might already have.

Mac OS X Spotlight

It occurred to me that, chances are, almost any PDF that has been made searchable will have at least one space in it. So, why not use Spotlight to find all PDFs that don’t have a space? Fire up Spotlight by going Command-Space and type the following:

kind:pdf NOT intext:" "

Is this a perfect test? No, but hopefully it will get you most of the way there.

Microsoft Windows

I had hoped to do the same thing with Windows Search in Windows 7, but it didn’t work. It doesn’t seem that it will let you just search for a space. The closest I could come to is to search for the word the. Obviously this is English only, so in your language hopefully there is an equivalent word that is in almost every document.

Start up Windows Search by pressing Windows Key-F and type the following:

ext:pdf NOT contents:the

That is not as likely to succeed as just searching for a space, but should get you most of the way there.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has some features that may help. You can use Acrobat Pro’s Preflight feature, or even do a Batch Process Accessibility Report.

None of these searches are 100% guaranteed to succeed, but hopefully they will help you down the path. Thanks to DocumentSnap reader Matt for the idea for this post.

Do you have any tricks for finding non-OCR’ed PDFs? Share in the comments.

(Photo by Dirigentens)

If you are a Mac OS X user, you will be familiar with Time Machine. If you are reading this site I would hope you are, as it is the super-easy backup solution that is built into the OS.

The premise of Time Machine is you plug in an external hard drive, your Mac detects it, and off you go backing up without having to do much of anything.

However, what happens if you don’t have an external hard drive, but you have another computer, particularly a Windows or Linux machine, on your network that you want to use for your backups?

Lifehacker has posted a guide (two actually) on how to accomplish this.

It is not for the faint of heart or people who don’t like messing around in the Terminal, but long story short you:

1. Create a shared folder on the Windows machine
2. Change a setting in the Mac to open a hidden Time Machine option
3. Do some Terminal trickery to get Time Machine to start doing the backup to the Windows machine

I recommend you read this Lifehacker post first so that you know what is going on, and in particular read the comments which provide some additional input.

Then, if you want to go for it, read this Lifehacker post which has a shell script that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Remember, this all adds a layer of complexity over and above simply plugging a drive in, so I would recommend being careful and test your backups regularly.

Do you have any other Time Machine hacks? Let’s hear them in the comments.

(Photo by AdamL212)

Today a consulting client had an issue that we’ve all done: He scanned a stack of paper intending to make it one PDF per sheet, but instead it went into one big PDF.

Since he didn’t want to re-scan, I broke down a few options for how to split a PDF using the built-in tools of Mac OSX. You can think of this as a companion piece to How To Combine PDFs Using Mac OSX Automator.

Option 1: Use Preview To Split Pages

Preview.app (the application you use to view PDFs and images) has some document management tools under the hood.

To split a file into pages using Preview:

• Open the file in Preview
• If you don’t see a list of pages on the right-hand side, click the Sidebar button near the search bar to open it
• Click and drag each page to your desktop or to a Finder window. It will then copy that page to its own PDF

Option 2: Use Automator To Split Pages

Much like combining PDF files to make one big one, you can split a PDF into separate pages using Automator.

There are a number of ways to do this of course, but in this example I will be making a Droplet. If you want to skip all this setup, I have attached my Droplet to the end of this post. It will hopefully work for you.

Ready? Here we go.

Start Automator

• In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator, the cool little robot icon

Choose Application

• In the window that pops up, highlight Application and then hit Choose

Set Up The PDF Action

• In the Library section on the left, you’ll see a line for PDF. Choose that
• In the next column over, there is an option for PDF To Images. Click that and drag it into the the section on the right

• Choose where you want the PDF to be saved to by default
• Choose if you want the new PDFs to have the same name as the original, or if you want to change it.
• Choose if you want it to replace the original file
• I want the ability to change it on the fly if needed, so I hit Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs.

Here is what this step looks like:

Nice work! Now you have your Automator action created. Go to File > Save As and save it either to your Desktop, your Applications folder, or anywhere else you desire.

Using The Droplet

You have just created a Droplet. This means that if you drag a PDF onto the icon, it will automatically run those actions you just created.

When you do this, if everything works well, a popup will come up asking where you want to save the PDFs and if you want to change the name. Choose and hit Continue.

Downloading The Droplet

As mentioned, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting this all up, you are welcome to use mine.

To use it, download the file to your computer, double-click it to Unzip it, and move the resulting “DSSplitPDF” file somewhere.

Once you’ve done that, follow the “Using The Droplet” instructions above.

I am sure you all have more tips to split PDFs, either on Mac or Windows. School us in the comments!

(Photo by recursion_see_recursion)

File this one under both “oldie but a goodie” and “insanely useful”.

As you probably know, Mac OSX has “Save As PDF” built into the operating system, so you can print to a PDF from pretty well anywhere. Convenient, but what if you could make it even more convenient?

David Sparks over at MacSparky put together a tutorial outlining how to create a keyboard shortcut for that “Save To PDF” functionality, so that all you need to do is hit Command-P twice.

The tutorial is easy to follow, but there are two updates that are needed for Snow Leopard.

Instead of going to Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences, go to Keyboard:

And then the location of All Applications has changed a bit:

After that, follow the rest of David’s tutorial and you should be good to go. Just make sure you type “Save As PDF…” exactly as he shows it.

(via shaunblanc).

Whether you are wanting to create an executive summary for a document, or you just want to get the gist of a long document before diving in, wouldn’t it be helpful if your computer could do the skimming for you?

The Mac OSX operating system and Microsoft Word on Windows have little-known summarizing tools that can do a pretty decent job of giving you the key points of a document or block of text.

In the examples below, I will use a PDF copy of the free 4 Ways To Tame Your Documents e-Book that you can get by signing up for the free Paper Sanity e-Course or my weekly Paper Cuts newsletter.

Mac OSX Summarize Service

Sometimes there are hidden features in the nooks and crannies of the OSX operating system, and Summarize Text is one of them. However, before I show you how to use it, we have to check if it is set up first.

Do You Have Summarize Enabled?

Open up a searchable PDF in Preview, a text file in a text editor, or a website in Safari.

Highlight some text and go to the Services menu. In this example in Preview I will go to Preview and then Services. Do you see Summarize in the list like this screenshot? If not, you’re going to have to enable it.

Enabling Summarize

From that same Preview (or whichever app you are in) > Services menu, click Services Preferences.

In the right pane, scroll way down to the bottom of the Text section and you should see Summarize there. Check it to enable.

Summarize It!

Back in whatever application you were just using, highlight the text you want to summarize or Select All if you want to do the whole document.

Right click on the text, and you should see Summarize (it may be buried in a Services submenu). Click it and it will open up the Summary application.

Your text will now be summarized, but it doesn’t stop there. By default it shrinks it by about 50%.

You can move the slider to make it bigger or smaller, so you can go way down to 1-5% and get a super short summary.

But you will probably get the best results at around the 25-30% mark.

Once you have things how you like them, you can either read the text there in the Summary application, copy & paste the text out, or save it as an RTF file.

AutoSummarize In Microsoft Word for Windows

While Windows users don’t have this functionality built into the operating system (as far as I know), a similar function does come included in Microsoft Word (at least in 2003 and 2007).

I was going to write a tutorial for you, but this AutoSummarize video by Microsoft pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

I can see myself using text summarization when I have a long document to read and I want to get the key points before digging in. How about you? Leave a note in the comments if you think this feature would (or wouldn’t be) useful and how you’d use it.

(Photo: visual.dichotomy)

A close friend of mine is currently doing a year long round-the-world trip. Being the sucker nice guy that I am, I have agreed to receive her mail and keep her important documents for her.

Sometimes I have situations where I need to scan stuff for her and send them electronically. Usually my trusty ScanSnap S1300 does the job, but there is the occasional situation where I have to use my flatbed.

However, what happens when I have multiple PDFs that really should go in one document? I needed a way to combine the PDFs together.

There are a million ways to do this, including some I have talked about before like using Preview.app to drag and drop pages, and there are lots of applications that one can use to combine PDFs, but I wanted to do something that would be:

• Already built into the OS and not require any additional software
• Easy to use
• Repeatable so I only have to set it up once and can use it again and again

I came across this great tutorial by George Harito that runs through how to use Automator to create a Service in Snow Leopard to combine PDFs for you. If you don’t know what the heck that means, don’t worry about it. I’ll take you through step by step.

(In case you’re wondering why I don’t just point to George’s tutorial and be done with it, it’s because there are some extra unneeded steps in there that might confuse some people, so I decided to recreate it here. The inspiration comes from George though and he deserves all the credit).

Create The Service

We’re going to be using an application called Automator to set this up. It looks a bit scary but don’t worry, what we’ll be doing is very easy.

Start Automator

• In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator, the cool little robot icon

Choose Service

• In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose

Set Up The PDF Action

• At the top in the middle, you will see a line that says Service receives selected and then a dropdown. Choose PDF files

• In the Library section on the left, you’ll see a line for PDF. Choose that
• In the next column over, there is an option for Combine PDF Pages. Click that and drag it into the the section on the right

Now we want to be able to give our new PDF a name.

• Go to the Library section and choose Files & Folders and drag Rename Finder Items to the canvas under your Combine PDF Pages
• It is going to ask you this: This action will change the names of the Finder items passed into it. Would you like to add a Copy Finder Items action so that the copies are changed and your originals are preserved?. You almost certainly want to hit Don’t Add because you want it to rename the file, not make a copy.
• We want to totally rename the file, so choose Name Single Item
• At the bottom, click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. It will then prompt you for a name for your new PDF when you run it.

So now we’ve told it to combine the PDFs and give it a name, but now we need to tell it where to put the new file.

• In the Library, still in Files & Folders, drag Move Finder Items to the canvas under your previous action
• You can leave the default location if you want, but click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. That way, it will ask you where you want to save your new PDF.

Here is the whole rule. Click to embiggen.

Awesome! You’re done. Now go File | Save As and give it a name like Combine PDF Files.

Using the Service

So why did we go through all this trouble to set it up as a Service?

Now any time I ever want to combine a bunch of PDFs, I just need to go to Finder, right click them, and check out the new option that I have:

When I choose Combine PDFs, I get a popup where I give it a name.

Then, another popup appears where I choose where it save it.

Et voila, I have my combined PDF with the 3 files that I had selected in the Finder.

From now on it will be super easy to combine any PDFs.

How about you?

What tricks/processes do you have for combining PDFs on the Mac? Leave a note in the comments or on the Facebook page.

Using the Kelly Clarkson quote was just way too easy, I know.  This post is not in fact about American Idol winners, but is about Hazel, a Mac-only rules-based file management application.  It does a ton of stuff, but today I am going to talk about how you can use it in a paperless workflow.

To be honest, DocumentSnap readers have been mentioning Hazel to me for quite some time, but for whatever reason I have never gotten around to looking at it until now.  As usual, you guys are way smarter than I am.  Why on earth did I wait?

Basically, you can think of Hazel as something that brings iTunes Smart Playlist-like rules to the files on your Mac.

How can this help in a paperless workflow?  Well, for example, you could have Hazel watch a folder, and then anything that you drop into it could be tagged, Spotlight comments added, OCR’ed, and then sent to a specific folder.

David Sparks from MacSparky has a great runthrough on how he does this.  I definitely recommend checking it out.  He has a bunch of Hazel rules that get triggered when he names a file something, like “gas bill”.  As soon as he names a file “gas bill.pdf”, the Hazel rules kick in and it gets renamed with the appropriate date added, then it gets sent to a nested folder structure based on type and date.  Very cool stuff.

He also describes this workflow in episodes #3 and #25 of the Mac Power Users Podcast.

Hazel And Evernote

As I said, there are a bunch of different ways you can use for Hazel in a paperless workflow.  One that pops to mind is to create a rule that sends something to Evernote.  Lets say we scan or receive PDFs and want to send certain ones to Evernote.

In my example, I’ll create a folder under Documents called “ToEvernote”.

Then I will create a Hazel Rule called “Evernote Import” that watches that folder, and acts on any PDFs that I save there.

First I will create a condition that acts on any files with Extension PDF:

Then I will run an Applescript, so will choose “Run Applescript”.  I will leave as “embedded script” and then hit “Edit Script”

Then I will paste in the following code to that box:

tell application "Evernote"
activate
create note from file theFile
end tell

Then I will hit the Plus sign to add a new action.  Once a file has been added to Evernote, I don’t want to keep it around, so I trash it.  I choose Move File and then select the Trash folder.

Here is what my final rule looks like:

Now, as soon as I drag a PDF into that toEvernote folder, Evernote pops up with the new note and the PDF is trashed. Coolio!

Of course, you can get extremely fancy here, but between this post and David Sparks’, you should be well on your way to paperless fun with Hazel.

I’m rocking the 14 day free trial now, but I think I will be paying the $22 to buy the full version.  Great stuff.

Do you use Hazel? Have any tricks? Leave a note in the comments.

A while ago, a reader (Boba Fett to be exact – I guess intergalactic bounty hunters need to back their stuff up too) suggested that amongst the other backup providers that I mention, I should talk about CrashPlan.

Since I know better than to cross the Fett (look what happened to Han), that’s exactly what I will do.

Cross Platform

Being a Mac dude, I appreciate when companies don’t just make software for Windows (though I understand when they do). I was pretty impressed that CrashPlan made their client not just for Windows and Mac, but for Linux and Open Solaris too.

Handles Both Local (For Free!) And Online Backup

One of the decisions people usually make when they think about backing up their computer (if they think about it at all) is whether to back up to an external drive, or whether to back up online.

CrashPlan handles both. The free CrashPlan software will let you automatically back up your stuff to an external USB drive or even to another computer.

The “other computer” part is kind of interesting. Chris over at Solo Technology has taken a clever approach using this.

Now, most of the computers I and family members own tend to have way more hard drive space than we need, so now we’re all hosting each other’s backups.

Here’s what I’ve got setup so far:

• My laptop backs up to my home machine. The backups are fast when both are on at home on the local network. Normally I wouldn’t want backups to be so close to where the machine is at night, but the “key” data on the laptop is also in DropBox so this is acceptable for now (until my little web of backups grows).
• My Home machine backs up to my mother’s machine – 700 miles away.
• Mother backs up to my home machine.
• Father backs up to my home machine.
• Wife is still on Mozy.

As I work on other family member machines I’ll be adding them to the “mesh” as well and continue to aim for geographically diverse options.

It, of course, has an Online Backup service called CrashPlan Central. If you just want to back up one computer it is $4.50/month, or if you want to do the unlimited family thing, it is $8.33/month. If you buy multiple years at once there is a discount.

Get The Party Started

As I’ve written about before, one of the problems with online backup is that the initial backup can take forever to transfer that stuff up to the cloud.

CrashPlan has a pretty clever option where for $125, they’ll send you a 1 TB drive. You can back up your stuff to the drive and mail it back, and they will restore it to your online account in one shot. More details about that here.

“I’m Big On Twitter”

Aside from Boba’s recommendation, I have seen a number of great comments about CrashPlan on Twitter. You can check out a search to see what people say about it.

All in all, CrashPlan looks like a good option if you want to do both offline and online backup. If you have any thoughts/comments/reviews of it, leave a message in the comments!