Steps toward a paperless office compliments of AppleScript…almost:
If you are in a hurry, I have broken this post up for easy reading:
[background info]
I am taking steps, hopefully, towards a paperless lifestyle where, thanks to Spotlight, I can summon documents at the type of a few keystrokes. How do I plan to do it? Well, it all starts with scanning the document in with my Epson Perferction Series 2400 Photo scanner, and then running the scanned TIFF file (I assume the TIFF is really the way to go) through OCR to create a PDF that is searchable thus allowing Spotlight to pick it up.
[my applescript problem]
I have created an AppleScript script that is able to control Image Capture.app for my particular scanner, for the most part using GUI Scripting thanks to some help from Prefab’s UI Browser. Here is the issue: In normal use, the scan window opens with the scanner then performing a low resolution overview scan. The user then selects a portion of the image from the scan and then clicks the scan button to scan just that portion of the document.
I can set all the parameters in the ‘Scan Setup’ (a drawer that pops out from the main window, but actually selecting the portion of the “Overview” scan image I have not understood how to accomplish). Nothing from the Prefab UI Browser reveals any hints. At least not yet.
Your comments and questions are appreciated. If anyone has interest in this topic of a paperless office, feel free to email me. I would imagine many lawyers who deal with documents on a daily basis would like something like this.
I am a full-time student, and I find this concept quite intriguing. I could put PDF of all my books on my PDA and not have to lug the weight everywhere. I could also read my books on my PDA during downtime at work. This would be the perfect solution to my back pain. Do you have website set-up to instruct people of how to accomplish this “paper-less” life, because I am quite interested and I am sure many others would be as soon as they read this post.
Once I have this figured out, I will be happy to share my learnings with anyone who is interested. My concern is that the title of this threat is not going to garner interest. I may need to repost this one with something that includes “Paperless Office” in the title. That was my mistake not doing this initially.
Just scan the whole thing rather than selecting a smaller portion of the prescan.
If you have an automatic document feeder for your scanner, and the right OCR software I think that you can automate the whole thing with the OCR application, though this is probably more for a “pro” set-up, but anything else would require too much “set-up” time to keep the process going for it to be worthwhile.
In order to enable the Scan button, you have to select some portion of the pre-scan. I would have been happy doing a select all, but you can’t.
And I disagree, Jerome, regarding your comment about being too much work. Sure a document feeder would be ideal, but for right now, I will go with just doing the document pages one at a time on the flatbed.
I just wanted to follow up to this thread and let everyone know that I came up with a solution and I am all about sharing knowledge. Unfortunately, I could not control Image Capture how I wanted to and thus had to resort to using a commercial package; IRIS’ Readiris Pro 11. I am still using some Applescript (GUI Scripting) there, but not alot. The software package is on sale now until Dec 27. Let me know if you want more info on that sale.
Anyone out there know anything about configuring SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy)?