Thanks for the quick response. I checked your idea about maybe Spaces getting in the way by disabling that feature completely. I still get the same warning message from FR. Looking at your script, I don’t quite understand why that would be, since you are testing for an already existing conversion process before launching the next one. Oh well, AppleScript’s never been my forte.

I also think that FR is a pretty decent piece of software after having played with some of the other alternatives like Readiris Pro for Mac. I like the simplicity of FR and the consistently accurate results. Abbyy today released a new version of their FR Express for Mac, but there’s no trial version, no upgrade path, and no mention of whether queuing is supported. The only thing that is being mentioned is that one can open multiple documents for processing and merging; a somewhat vague statement.

I imagine that the script you wrote is being called every time a new document is being added to the scanned-documents folder. Does this mean that multiple instances of the script are running at the same time? If so, are they not getting in each other’s way? I guess one could add new documents to a queue file using either launchd or Folder Actions and have another script work through this list. I might have a whack at it … or at least try to completely understand your elaborate script;-)

Thanks,
Carsten

I agree about the FineReader limitations. The FR engine is an excellent piece of software, but they have purposefully made FineReader for ScanSnap to be a limited-feature product. So, we hack together scripts to get around some of these limitations.

I have run into the problem you describe in one situation: when I am running FineReader in one Space and I change to a different Leopard Spaces window. My scripting skillz just weren’t up to the task of figuring out if the app was showing a window in a different Leopard Spaces window.

Unless someone has a good fix for this, my own solution is to never switch to another space while processing is happening (though it would certainly be convenient to do so).

Now about FineReader’s hobbled functionality…

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind this so much, since it is given away with the scanner, but vendors typically provide limited versions like this when they want you to upgrade to their fancier product. Sadly, I just don’t get the feeling that Abbyy is really behind their full price Mac version of FineReader.

They offer no trial version, and there are sparse details about the scripting and batch processing capabilities of the product. As Hans did above, you simply have to trust that it is good and drop a hundred bucks on it.

If Abbyy were to make a better product for OS X, I would gladly pay a few hundred for it.

The shame is, the engine can do all of this and more. We are using a Linux-compiled version of the FineReader engine SDK in my workplace, with shell scripts and such, to index great loads of scientific papers. It runs happily on multiple processors, chewing up thousands of pages per day.

FineReader for the Macintosh is a powerful product, weakened by ho-hum client software.

That’s a great idea and makes using the scanner so much more useful. It’s a shame that one cannot run multiple instances of FR in the first place or that there isn’t a built-in queu. While running your script, I still get a message from FR after scanning more than one document while OCR is underway. It says “Can’t open files while the recognition is under way”. Any idea how to fix this? Right now, one needs to press the OK button to proceed; if one doesn’t, FR stops at the “Saving the resulting file ….” step. Everything else works very well.

Thanks,
Carsten

I have been reading your blog posts and came across this one on OCR. I thought you might be interested to check out OCR Terminal as well.
This is an online OCR service that we provide. We have some neat features, such as

· 20 free page credits per month

· Supports many input formats, such as PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG and GIF

· Results can be downloaded as DOC, searchable PDF, RTF and plain text

· API to help developers integrate OCR functionality in their web apps

Besides OCR Terminal recently came out of Beta. So take a minute to try us out! We love to hear what you think about it.

Thanks!

Xuwen (Ms)
OCR Terminal
http://www.ocrterminal.com