Our paperless project revisited
Posted on April 24, 2007
Filed Under All, Technology |
So we’ve flagged a bit in our paperlesss project, especially scannning in every document that comes through the mail et al., OCRing it in Adobe Acrobat and storing it in YEP, the very nice PDF browser for Mac (though I did a little catch-up tonight). YEP has new features at rev. 1.6: and I’m thinking about how I might want to make some changes.
Our current YEP collection runs on a G4 mini, and has some 1400 documents. I found nearly everything I needed for our taxes this year, the only missing items being things I hadn’t scannned. Now, I’m considering scanning all of my medical paperwork - bills, diagnoses et al. - it’s a huge set of files. YEP’s new feature - no file import, it just recognizes PDFs wherever they are in the file system - makes that an intriguing possibility.
I could buy inexpensive USB storage, spend the time to run alll the paper through the ScanSnap and Acrobat and be done. I might also move YEP to the Intel Core Duo for more horsepower, and figure out how to get our Canon multi-purpose device (it has a batch scannner built in and that rarity - a Mac Twain driver - so it works with Acrobat and YEP) into the act, along with the ScanSnap.
I’m also wondering if it makes sense to put documents into annual folders: 20006, 2007 and so on. The PDF scans are on the big side because of the bitmap data, but the numbers of documents - in the hundreds or low thousands - is reasonable in computer terms. And maybe I should do more hand taggging of documents: I rely on Acrobat’s OCR and YEP’s use of Apple’s Spotlight to make docs findable (and less of a chore to handle). We may have to do a little nerdly poking this weekend…
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Funny seeing a photographer scanning documents religously. You’d think a $5000 camera would be faster than a scanner.