Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard.

[UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.]

[UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is good!]

When Snow Leopard came out back in 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 work!

I depend greatly on the OCR capabilities of the ABBYY FineReader software that comes with the ScanSnap scanners, and this was one of the many pieces of software that did not smoothly transition to Snow Leopard. I could scan documents, with limited functionality, but the OCR feature did not work.

Now that Fujitsu has released their official update, I will probably be installing Snow Leopard tomorrow evening. Now, do I do an upgrade or a full install? Hmmmm…

UPDATE

Well, they only delivered half of the goods.

I was reading through the seven-step process for updating the ScanSnap drivers and I arrived at step seven:

Step 7: The download for FineReader for ScanSnap update to Snow Leopard will be hosted by ABBYY but is not yet available. If you have already subscribed to be notified by Fujitsu regarding the Snow Leopard updates, an email will be sent to you when it is posted.

How displeasing. The only thing I really cared about was getting the OCR to work, and apparently Abbyy has not yet delivered their part (How hard can it be to update the part in your code that says “If the PDF metadata doesn’t match X then the document isn’t a ScanSnap doc” ?).

UPDATE 2

Instead of making us wait another month or two, ABBYY has delivered their patch in record time . I quickly installed the update and tested my ScanSnap script…

There are a few kinks to work out, but it is pretty clear that I will have my same old workflow AppleScript folder action up and running in short order. I will post the newer script as soon as I have it running properly.

And, as a side note, I had already purchased PDFpen from SmileOnMyMac as a backup plan. Their tool incorporates the OmniPage OCR engine, an engine that rivals that of ABBYY. My script was already running with PDFpen, but there were some issues with tables in documents that I forwarded on to SmileOnMyMac. One of these days I’ll post my scripts for PDFpen.