One of my new years resolutions was to turn Second Gear into a paperless office. To start that resolution off right I recently picked up a Fujitsu S510M. The S510M comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat Professional, but I’ve always found Acrobat to be too bloated for me to use without wanting to pull out hair.
SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen 4 has the ability to OCR documents and uses far less resources doing so than Acrobat. I’ve built a modified version of Joe Kissel’s OCR It scripts for Acrobat to use PDFpen instead.
To use it, do the following:
-
Download the script from here.
-
Unzip and place the
OCR This (PDFpen)script in/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ -
Create a folder on your Desktop or any other location you’d like.
-
Attach a folder action to the folder you created and select the
OCR This (PDFpen)script as the action to perform.
Now whenever you pop a PDF into this folder, it will open in PDFpen, perform an OCR conversion, save the file and close it out.
If you find this script useful please do consider purchasing a license for Today to show your thanks.
Updated July 1, 2009 - I’ve updated the script to require PDFpen 4.1.4, which has some new OCR functionality in the AppleScript dictionary. No more GUI scripting!