I finally put together my wonderfully hungry Fujitsu Scansnap S1500M with a great little AppleScript droplet to drive Acrobat Pro to do the OCR on batches of documents. So I can finally do this:
- Take a (physical) folder full of papers that I will never look at again, probably, but don’t want to lose
- Scan the whole thing into a PDF and naming it
- Repeat until I have a Mac folder full of PDFs
- Drag those files onto the droplet and walk away while Acrobat OCR’s them
- Trash or shred the papers
- Fire up Spotlight and search those docs
This strikes me as almost pure magic. Stacks of papers are disappearing at last. Information is not lost, it just takes up less space — and I can even search it now. The only downside so far is that the size of the files once they are OCR’d by Acrobat seems to increase about 4-5x. Fortunately, drive space is cheap…
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