I have a question I hope you both can answer without any legal problems [EDIT: Question removed - sorry, we can't answer any legal questions outside of our respective jobs.]

My Thanks to you Katie & David.
Sincerely,
Thomas

I’ve immediately fallen in love with it, and in combination with Hazel have developed a workflow that makes going through monthly statements ridiculously easy.

David talks about how he uses Hazel to pick out the file name he gives a file and process it accordingly. The DocumentSnap website, among others, mentions the power of the Scansnap software to pick out highlighted text as keywords.

However I haven’t found any of that necessary. A lot of my mail has the same key elements each month – my bank statements, service bills etc. Even a lot of letters that come in from the same people or company will need to be named and filed in a similar fashion. So I just straight out use the OCR.

I set up rules to say ‘if document contains’ and then put in things like ‘Phone Bill’ ‘Account No.’ ‘Company Name’ etc, then name it something appropriate, and file it in the appropriate place. This means I can literally stuff a bunch of paper in the scanner and forget about it, no further processing required.

I’m loving this device!

I have done a lot of experimentation lately with my paperless workflow with OCR on a budget. I started with the software which came with my Canon flatbed scanner which allows me to scan to a searchable PDF in one step and would allow you to scan multiple pages, but the accuracy if the OCR wasn’t as good as I would like. I also bought an app for the iPhone called DocScanner which lets you take photos of text, choose the cropping area, correct them for perspective, clean them up and finally OCR the text and send to Evernote or email. That did a very good job, so I bought the desktop version of that app too.

But after a lot of testing I found that Evernote does a better job of OCR than either of my dedicated scanning apps, and that Preview is fast and easy to do the actual scanning. So my workflow now is to scan pages to PDF and assemble these into a multiple-page PDF document all within Preview, then drop the completed document into Evernote Pro and then delete the originals. Similarly if I’m without my scanner I can snap photos with my iPhone using DocScanner and send them to Evernote from there.

I don’t see a place in preferences to save, so it must have been prompted the first time. Do a Spotlight search for the extension .dwlibrary (for a document library) or .rwlibrary (for a receipt library).

I did notice that in the preferences, there is a place to checkmark “write metadata to PDF’s” and “append date to filenames of documents”. I have everything on that preference panel checked and that makes it easy to identify the files in the “package contents”.

Hopefully, your spotlight search will find your files. And then make sure that those items are checked in your preferences. This will make the documents easier to identify on their own.

I just have a little problem: where is the Paperless library?

I don’t see it in Application Support. I performed a Spotlight search and couldn’t find it either.

Inside the Receipts/Documents folder is nested folders based on year/month of the scanned item. Inside those folders are the .pdf files that were created when they were brought into the Paperless library.

So if Paperless does go out of business and if the application were no longer able to function, just right-click and drag out the Receipts/Document folder that holds it all. The files are nicely nested by time period and the file names are labeled with their name/date.

Nice structure.

Note: great application, real time-saver.
The only problem is: the day the get out of business, if we’re still around, well, we’ll have to export everything from Paperless to PDFs and here we go again…

If I’m importing existing PDF’s, etc. does Paperless make a COPY of the PDF for it’s own database or does it simply reference the current location of the existing document.

In other words, do I leave documents where they’re currently stored or do I delete them after importing into Paperless.

Also, not to be a troll, but when you say you don’t want to trust proprietary software to store important documents, what do you call an encrypted Apple sparse image? Can that .dmg file be rendered usable if you don’t have access to Mac OS? If not, then it’s proprietary.

All the best with your new shows.

Phil

Script has two errors in it. First is that the quotation marks are not the right format. Should be ” to be recognized. The second is a syntax error, that states “Expected end of line but found identifier” for the line ending in “ocr aPage”. Any savvy Apple-scripters out that that has the right solution?

Thangs