Comments on: When migrating to a new operating system, Look Before You Leap!

By: Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap | Paper Jammed

Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap | Paper Jammed — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:37:06 +0000

[...] August, I ordered my copy the first week and was so excited that I installed it the day it arrived. My joy was short-lived, however: the most important software package I use did not [...]

By: Tad

Tad — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:16:14 +0000

Thanks for the good news on the Scansnap/Finereader combo. I’m pretty confident that as the next week or two pass most of the Snow Leopard software issues will either be resolved or will be understood better.

I haven’t given up hope yet—my Snow Leopard DVD is still sitting on my desk, ready for action.

It’s funny that I just don’t seem to remember this much fuss when I migrated from Tiger to Leopard; but then again that was during my first year on Macintosh so I hadn’t yet settled in.

I’m already expecting that I will hit a few quirks along the way that I will have to learn to live with. When I migrated to Leopard, my spiffy HP LaserJet 1320 started flashing the error light every time I printed a document. It still works, but I have to go downstairs to the printer and press the “Go” button for the document to come out. HP never fixed it, and AppleCare couldn’t figure it out. There’s an ancient thread out there somewhere about it with plenty of people having the same issue, but I can’t imagine that it will ever be fixed…

By: Michael F

Michael F — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:49:51 +0000

Hey — I did upgrade to Snow Leopard, and wanted to give you a quick update on the Scansnap situation.

There are two issues, at least with the version of software that came with my new Scansnap S1500M.

1) The Scansnap Manager software’s “Quick Menu” function doesn’t work. There is a very quick fix you can do (editing a text file) to disable it. I never used it anyway – I wanted more control than that. “Scan to Folder” by contrast DOES work, despite earlier reports.

2) The “Finereader for Scansnap” app has a bug that causes it not to recognize PDFs as coming from Scansnap Manager, even when they do. The cause seems to be the “PDF Producer” metadata tag embedded in the PDF. The Finereader software is looking for “Mac OS X 10.5.8 Quartz PDFContext”, but under Snow Leopard, the string is set to “Mac OS X 10.6 Quartz PDFContext” instead.

There is a fix for this as well — there’s a free command line tool called pdftk that can modify this metadata. I’ve confirmed that fixing this is all that is required to get Finereader for Scansnap to work again on files scanned under Snow Leopard.

It looks easy enough to turn this process into an Automator workflow, and save it as a folder action, or even as an app that Scansnap Manager can hand off its scanned files to. (Could also be a service under Snow Leopard, so that you can process previously-scanned-under-SL PDFs by right-clicking them and choosing the service.)

The details of what I found out are in the comments of the post you linked to, above.

Hope this is helpful if you do decide to migrate forward…