The other day I posted an Applescript to OCR documents using PDFPen. In the comments, awesome DocumentSnap reader Josh requested that it be done as a Hazel rule instead. Given that my love for Hazel is well documented, I am happy to oblige. I created a folder and then created the following Hazel rule to […]
Continue readingI don’t know if it is because I have been glued to a computer since I was six years old, but my handwriting and printing is terrible. Really terrible. I think my 5 year old son and I have pretty similar handwriting skills. Normally this is not a problem, except when I have to fill […]
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What is the holy grail of going paperless? There are a lot of tricks out there for keeping your documents organized based on their location or filename, but the holy grail is to be able to keep them organized based on the actual contents of the documents themselves. In other words, our computer does the […]
Continue readingSometimes you just want a way to get text out of an image, whether it is a PDF you’ve downloaded, a document you want to scan, or even one from your digital camera or smartphone. There are a number of ways to do this, but one free way on Windows is to use TopOCR. As […]
Continue readingYou may remember that a few months ago I did a how to make a $20 book scanner post. What I did not know then, but I do now thanks to awesome DocumentSnap reader Luke from Australia, is that there is a whole vibrant community around building and using DIY book scanners. The main site […]
Continue readingThe 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 […]
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Whether you are wanting to create an executive summary for a document or you just want to get the gist before diving in, wouldn’t it be helpful if your computer could do the skimming for you? The Mac OS X operating system and Microsoft Word on Windows have little-known summarizing tools that can do a […]
Continue readingRecently I wrote about how to combine PDF files using Mac OSX, so today I’d like to give Windows the same treatment. Of course, there are a huge number of applications out there that will do this, and if I had any brains I’d point you to some expensive one that would get me a […]
Continue readingRecently in the DocumentSnap newsletter I wrote about how I am going through a bunch of my old magazines, scanning in just the articles I want and recycling the rest. Here is how I am doing it: 1. Cut out the pages from the magazine 2. Scan the article with my Fujitsu ScanSnap directly into […]
Continue readingAs anyone who has read DocumentSnap for any length of time knows, I’m a bit of a fan of Evernote. Recently Brett Kelly at Bridging The Nerd Gap has released an 80+ page guide to Evernote called Evernote Essentials. At first you might think that Evernote is a pretty simple application (you put stuff in, […]
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