Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

the noise -is- the signal

Paperless Office?

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DEVONthink Pro OfficeI’m trying out a paperless office solution. Lots of people use Yojimbo as their db of choice. I actually have licenses for EagleFiler (I was a winner in the Daring Fireball membership drive) and KIT (part of some MacZot bundle, I think), but integration with the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner is what put DEVONthink Pro Office over the top for me. It scans my documents, does OCR, and automatically puts searchable pdfs in my database. Pretty slick. I thought of trying to put together something with AppleScript, but coordinating three applications (scan, OCR, database) is too brittle.

My goal is to eliminate most of the paper (which takes up space and isn’t searchable) from my filing system. Obviously, legal documents can’t be tossed out, but most stuff can be scanned and shredded. Key features of any such system include effortless scanning, reliable searching, and some sort of auto-classification would be nice. Having to type keywords for each thing entered is one step it would be nice to eliminate, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen. :)
I’m still in my 30-day trial period for the scanner, so if anybody has advice on this score, please chime in!

Written by michael

April 30th, 2007 at 10:18 am

Posted in Tech

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2 Responses to 'Paperless Office?'

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  1. When I scan a sheet at 600dpi and send it through “Reduce File Size” & OCR in Adobe Acrobat Std 7, I end up with a PDF that’s about 30kb to 50kb. [Scans had to be at 600dpi or greater, otherwise the resulting PDF was much larger. It’s the “Best” setting Scansnap Manager]

    When I do the same with DEVONthink Pro Office, I got a file that was several hundred kb in size.

    The culprit, from what I could find, was the ReadIris OCR Engine. I got similar results with the standalone ReadIris app.

    Perhaps you could try a few test scans before settling on a workflow.

    Hope this helps

    PS: I used the Fujitsu Scansnap fi-5110EOXM

    V C

    11 May 07 at 8:22 pm

  2. It would sure be nice if they produced optimal output, but the ease of workflow is critical to me. I think the extra step could easily be the downfall of the whole system!

    michael

    15 May 07 at 7:21 am

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