I 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 out a form. It’s a little embarrassing filling out some official form with my chicken scratch, which is one of the many reasons why I love PDFPen. Among many other things, it lets you fill out and edit any PDF document on your computer and then print it out.
However, that ability is not what this post is about. PDFPen will also OCR PDFs to make them searchable, and I wanted a way to OCR a bunch of documents automatically with an Applescript, similar to what has been done with Adobe Acrobat and with ABBYY FineReader.
I found two scripts out there. One from David Sparks at MacSparky, which some users reported problems with in newer PDFPen versions, and one from Michael Tsai at C-Command Software which will OCR a document with PDFPen and send it to EagleFiler.
Since both of these scripts were almost what I wanted, I decided to stand on the shoulder of giants and merge them together into this Applescript.
Here is the script:
-- Downloaded From: http://www.documentsnap.com
-- Last Modified: 2010-09-28
-- Includes code from MacSparky http://www.macsparky.com/blog/2009/5/24/pdfpen-ocr-folder-action-script.html
-- Includes code from C-Command Software http://c-command.com/scripts/eaglefiler/ocr-with-pdfpen
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
try
repeat with added_item in added_items
my ocr(added_item)
end repeat
on error errText
display dialog "Error: " & errText
end try
end adding folder items to
on ocr(added_item)
tell application "PDFpen"
open added_item as alias
tell document 1
ocr
repeat while performing ocr
delay 1
end repeat
delay 1
close with saving
end tell
end tell
end ocr
To implement, follow MacSparky’s excellent instructions.
I hope this is of use to someone, and thanks to David and Michael for their excellent Applescripts.
