Digitising paperwork

April 7, 2008 11:25 AM

I want to digitise my paperwork! What is the best scanner/scanning program for this?

I was searching through various folders, boxes, files etc etc etc for this one welcome letter I received from a bank, when I realised that I should really start scanning things.

I'd like a one-click (or as simple as possible) scanning program which can automatically rotate, do OCR (to make it searchable) and save the file with its name as the date of the statement, if possible.

Oh, and it should work under Linux, if possible.

Anybody got any ideas?

posted by edbyford to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I just bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M, and it's totally awesome for exactly the kind of scanning tasks you describe. Its Windows counterpart is the S510, and it looks like someone has it working with Linux.
posted by esd at 11:40 AM on April 7, 2008

Seconding the ScanSnap. Worth every penny.
posted by phatkitten at 11:41 AM on April 7, 2008

Can you scan a more-than-two-page document into a single PDF using the ScanSnap?I was under the impression that it created a new PDF file every two pages.
posted by Flipping_Hades_Terwilliger at 12:12 PM on April 7, 2008

Flipping_Hades_Terwilliger, in my experience with the S510M's software, it creates a single PDF file out of however many documents it scanned from the feeder. In other words, if you load n documents into the feeder and hit the "Scan" button, the resulting PDF will have about 2n pages—one page for each non-blank side of the pages you scanned.

(Also, it's possible to break up or combine PDFs using the included Acrobat Professional software, if need be.)
posted by esd at 12:32 PM on April 7, 2008

Scansnap now has a less expensive portable model, the S300.
posted by MsMolly at 1:51 PM on April 7, 2008

Fujitsu ScanSnap 500 Series. Most amazing document scanner. If you want to go cheaper, you can try to pick up an older HP ScanJet w/ ADF off eBay, I did that however it just doesn't touch the performance of the ScanSnap so I went with that. It does absolutely everything you want and comes with Adobe Acrobat. Working it under Linux might be possibly, I've never tried but I doubt all the functionality that makes it useful would work properly.

Merlin Mann at 43folders posted about it (http://www.43folders.com/2007/10/23/fujitsu-scansnap-workflow)
posted by cgomez at 2:38 PM on April 7, 2008

Here's another excellent 43-Folders posting on this subject--covers all aspects of digiti(s/z)ing paper.
posted by capcuervo at 3:37 PM on April 7, 2008