Through a scanner, double-sidedly

[hrj]

So at last year's MacWorld Expo, I picked up an automatic sheet-feeding doublesided color scanner that processes automatically to pdf with the notion that I'd start converting significant quantities of my four 4-drawer filing cabinets full of photocopied articles into electronic form (and thus a much smaller storage footprint). Yesterday I finally set it up, installed the software (with some quantities of swearing) and started figuring out how to coax it to behave as promised. The actual scanning part of the process is great -- the quality is limited only by the often-dreadful quality of the original photocopies. The conversion to pdf is swift and painless. The automatic sheet-feeding is ... coming along.

I started out on a recently-photocopied 24 page single-sided article and had horrendous problems with it grabbing multiple sheets and jamming. But for my next project I pulled out the old Windy Meads newsletters that I wanted to scan for the West Kingdom history project (see discussion here). These are 30-year-old stapled, folded, and -- yes -- mutilated newsletters on non-archival paper. But once I learned the trick of dealing through the pages one at a time to make sure they were separated first, I cut down on the jam and multi-page-feed problems enormously. So the newsletters are all scanned and compiled into a single pdf with bookmarks added. I'm still working on the best method for redacting out personal contact information. (Yes, I doubt that any of the people involved are still at the same address or phone after all this time, but it's the principle.) Acrobat doesn't seem to have a "censor this information" feature, so I may have to export the file into Photoshop and do it there.

Oh, and unless my memory is failing me entirely, the number on my bathroom scale this morning was the same as the one recorded on my first driver's license.

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a really cool tool for dealing with old papers. And congrats on your new/old number. I'm slowly getting into the weight loss groove again, and discovering again how much calories affect my mood.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'll take a look at it in more detail later. Since I already have all the articles cataloged in Excel, at the moment all I need to do is add new fields for "scanned yes/no" and "file name". But eventually I need to do something more organized with all my various types of reference files