If you’re trying to run a paperless office, the first step is getting your
papers scanned into your Mac. We recommend Fujitsu ScanSnap
scanners as the easiest way to create a multi-page PDF from a stack of papers.
The second (optional) step is to use optical character recognition (OCR) to make the text
in the scanned PDFs searchable and selectable. The easiest way to do this is to
use Smile Software’s PDFpen to add a
text layer to your PDF. You can do this directly in PDFpen, but it’s easier to
automate the process via AppleScript. To do this, download the OCR With PDFpen script in compiled
format. There are several ways you can use this script:
- EagleFiler’s script menu
- Follow the instructions on the How can I run AppleScripts from EagleFiler’s
script menu? page, then save the script file into the the folder to add
the OCR With PDFpen command to the script menu. Then you can simply
select PDF files in EagleFiler and choose OCR With PDFpen.
- Drag and drop
- Use AppleScript Editor to save the script as an application. Then drag and
drop PDF files onto it to OCR them and then import them into EagleFiler.
- Direct from ScanSnap
- Save the script as an application and set it as the target of your scanner’s
software. For example, go to the Application tab of the ScanSnap
Manager’s settings, click Add or Remove, and choose the script
application. The scanned files will be run through OCR and then imported
into EagleFiler.
- Folder action
- Attach the script to a folder as a folder action and save files into that
folder.