Recently 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 Evernote
3. Remove the pages that I don’t want from the article
The last step is strictly unnecessary, but for some reason it just bugs me having pages in the PDF that don’t belong.
This is a problem with magazines of course, because inevitably at least a few of the pages will have an advertisement or another article on the back side.
I’m going to step you through how I accomplish this. The example will be on the Mac using Preview.app, but you can do the same thing on Windows if you have a PDF editor.
Scan The Article Into Evernote
In this example I scanned a 4 page article, but there are actually 6 pages in the PDF: one from another article altogether, and the other an ad for “lifestyle franchises”.
Again there is no harm leaving them in, and it is probably not worth the time to remove them, but I just do it anyways.
Once in Evernote, open the PDF in Preview
Right click on the PDF in the note and choose “Open With” and choose Preview (or the PDF editor of your choice).
In Preview, remove the unwanted pages
In the sidebar on the right-hand side, go to the pages that you want to get rid of and hit Delete.
Save and exit back to Evernote
In your PDF editing application, save the file and then quit Preview.
Voila! Now when you open the note in Evernote, you’ll find that the PDF only has four pages. The other two are gonzo.
(Photo: limonada)