Comments on: Automate ScanSnap OCR process on your Mac with AppleScript (Snow Leopard Edition)

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:53:29 +0000

I was glad to find this script but it for some reason won’t work on my system. Checking the log it always quits the script with the event “Other script running. Exiting…”. Any suggestions on what I can do to fix this?

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:45:56 +0000

Carsten,
Do you know the version number of the latest FineReader for ScanSnap (for Mac)? Any idea where we can find the update that allows the scan queueing you stumbled across? And is the update available to owners of the S510M? I ask because I believe that the most current version of the ScanSnap Manager software is only available to owners of the news S1500M.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 03:52:42 +0000

Hi Tad,

Thanks for updating the script to work under Snow Leopard with the latest ABBY and Scan Manager. It turns out that your script has been obsoleted by ABBY’s ability to queue scans in the latest version. I discovered this by accident when I dropped several PDFs generated via the ScanSnao S510M. It just works. Also, using the “Scan to PDF” feature of the ScanSnap Manager works as one would expect. One doesn’t need to wait for OCR of one document to be complete before starting the next scan. It’s a wonderful thing after all and now works as it should have from the very beginning.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:58:48 +0000

Hi,

Thanks so much for this very useful guide. I’m new to all of this, and you seem very well versed, so maybe you could help with this question.

My desired workflow is 1) scan, 2) OCR, 3) import to Yojimbo.

Is there any way I could modify this script to do that?

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:02:11 +0000

The problem is that a digital encrypted signature will not display if someone views the pdf using other software than adobe’s. If on the other hand you make a custom stamp with an imgae of your “wet ink” signature then anyone can see it regardless of software.. ofcourse it is less “safe” to distribute your document with a signature image that might be “stolen”

By: PDFPen OCR Applescript To Automatically Make PDFs Searchable | DocumentSnap

PDFPen OCR Applescript To Automatically Make PDFs Searchable | DocumentSnap — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:11:47 +0000

[...] However, that ability is not what this post is about. PDFPen will also OCR PDFs to make them searchable, and I wanted a way to OCR a bunch of documents automatically with an Applescript, similar to what has been done with Adobe Acrobat and with ABBYY FineReader. [...]

By: Tad

Tad — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:23:15 +0000

Glad to hear you found a solution. As I said further up, for one situation at work we ended up licensing the ABBYY engine for Linux and running everything in batch mode.

There was no great coding work on our part: we simply built their command line example and then wrapped that with a bash script.

Some stuff works fine in a desktop scripting model, but there is a threshold beyond which a more batch-level solution is best.

By: M

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:10:25 +0000

Hi Tad,

yes, that didn’t work out on my side. I’ve now bought the Linux engine of ABBYY (150 EUR for 12000 pages a year) and written a wrapper around it that recursively and autonomously iterates my directory structure and runs the engine on all documents that have not yet been treated. I’ve made it open source:

http://www.mnsoft.org/547.0.html?&cHash=9120c122ed&tx_ttnewsbackPid=544&tx_ttnewstt_news=30

and

pdfocrwrapper.sourceforge.net.

Tested on thousands of pages, works perfectly.

HTH,

By: Tad

Tad — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:24:09 +0000

Hi M,

This sounds like pure AppleScript, isn’t it? Even if the apps don’t provide any explicit AppleScript support, you can still have it drive the keyboard for you and automate the process.

The goal behind my own script was to allow FineReader to run unattended while I was sipping tea somewhere else, and it does that just swimmingly.

One point of difference: you are using FineReader Express 8, while I am working with FineReader for ScanSnap. If anything, I would assume yours provides more functionality.

By: M

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:04:47 +0000

Hi Tad,

I am trying to make this work with ABBY FineReader Express 8 for Mac. Making some progress in that I can hand over to the program the PDF I want to work on; then I still have to tell the program “do it”, afterwards “save”; then next file.

Do you think there’s a way to remote control the program entirely? I always want to use the same settings, but unattended.

Thanks,