Thanks for the reply. If you don’t mind an extension to my question, I could use your help on something.

My eventual goal in all this is to get everything on the iPad, which means ePub, of course.
The S300M doesn’t come with OCR software, so I have been doing the OCR in Acrobat. When I scan a text document into Acrobat on the highest compression setting in the ScanSnap software, a 50pg document comes in to Acrobat and it is about 3-4mb. However, when I run OCR on it, that document is not 20-25mb! When I run the Reduce File Size command, it shaves off only 1-2mb. Why are these so large?

Since I am not going to keep these anyways, I wanted to see if you would recommend copy/pasting the OCR’d text into InDesign and doing an ePub output (something I now know what to do thanks to you) or use Calibre to just convert the pdf to ePub.

Thanks again for all your help

Bodie

Thank you for your review and recommendation of the ScanSnap S300M, I just got mine!! I am going to be using it for a large document scanning process and I wanted to know if you could share with me your best practices with scanning and Acrobat. Here are some questions I have:

1) What compression setting would you use for text documents? I used 4 out of 5 on compression.
2) After scanning, Acrobat opens. What then? Run OCR? Optimize PDF? Reduce File Size?

Love some tips on how you keep file sizes down, and quality up, as well as having all the goodies like OCR.

Continually thankful for you!

Bodie

btw… what’s with trying to prevent people from using hardware they paid for? Let us buy the machine once and use it for whatever computers we have!!!

I tried connecting the S300M to an XP and it won’t work. Fuji’s tech support says it’s not possible to use the “M” on a Windows machine. Have you had any luck with the other driver?

Please note that we haven’t tried the S1500M on XP/Vista/Win7 because the M version supposedly doesn’t work on that platform although I’ve read about people downloading the Japanese drivers off Fujitsu’s site to make it work on XP. AFAIK the only real difference between the Mac and PC version is that the Mac version of the S1500 is white and the PC version is white. We haven’t tried popping in the CD into a Windows machine to see if the drivers for Windows Xp/Vista are included. They just might be. Just wanted to include that for completeness sake. I hope you people OCR’ing on the XP side are experiencing faster performance. I’ve read about law offices using this scanner for their thousand page files that are happy with it but I seriously doubt they’re OCRing their PDF’s to make them text-searchable.

I got the ScanSnap S1500M (no clue why they make Mac vs. PC versions of the same hardware) and it scans really fast but has a few glaring flaws. 1) The OCR is HORRIBLY slow. It is so slow that I’m pretty sure that if I timed the slow-scanning, fast OCRing Canon vs. the fast-scanning, slow OCRing Fujitsu, it would probably be a draw. I’ve tried this on slow and fast machines with gobs of RAM. 2) The rubber rollers on the Fujitsu bend the page ever so slightly so that when you look at your resultant scanned PDF page, you notice 2 rows of little bends on your documents. It’s especially noticeable when there are squares in the documents. We considered running the OCR after hours but it’s not reliable and doesn’t fit into our workflow.

In all instances, we’re using the default software with optimised settings. 200DPI, black&white. We are a medical office and we scan and shred completed documents that are signed. Our requirements are 1)that the document be searchable and 2) when printing the document (i.e. to send to insurance, etc) that it is nearly as legible as the original.

On the Fujitsu we are not using the included Acrobat 8 (weird since 9 has been out) because we want as few steps as possible for the staff.

Anyway, we’re dissapointed in the overall speed of the Fujitsu because the end result is it takes the same amount of time from start to finish for a particular document. It would be fine if we didn’t run OCR and just saved the PDF as essentially a file of multi-page images. It’s amazing that a $100 (free with rebate) Canon MFP can OCR so fast.

Yes, as far as I can tell, Read Iris will do OCR for you. Looks like a great deal if you don’t have OCR software. I’m getting the free case they are offering since I have DTPO which will do OCR for me. I’ve started using my S300M and it’s speed is perfect for my needs. Again, it was Terry’s review that sold me on it. I love it’s small footprint.

Just a heads up you can get the neat receipts software by itself (mac or PC) and it works with the Fujitsu scanners.

http://www.neatco.com/support/downloads/mac-hardware/

I actually came here trying to decide on the S300M or the neatco scanner. The latter has the size I want, but not the speed. grrrrrrrrr.

Hopefully I can get the end results to evernote!