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Anybody hear about MO (magneto optical) media? Pretty good technology. A 3.5 inch disk can store 2 GB and 5.25 inch one 9 GB. Plus their "Archival life" is 50 years. Says so on Fujitsu's web site. I think they are cool and should be more popular (would probably make it cheaper). Anybody interested look here: http://www.fcpa.com/products/mo-drives

From Fujitsu

ScanSnap may be just what you need if the notes are on a uniform-sized paper (e.g. A4 or letter). You need Acrobat (included) on a Windows machine, but you just set the notes on the scanner and click a mouse then it scans 50 sheets (both sides in one-pass) without human intervention and gives you an Acrobat file in a few minutes. It is small and weighs light so you can easily bring it into the secretary's office. The price is also reasonable ($495 with Acrobat 6.0), and it seems they are even offering a $100 rebate now.

The specified resolution is for a colored documents. For a b/w one, you will get a better resolution. You can obtain scan samples from a Japanese page (pdf files at the bottom).

Actually, a newer model, fi-5110EOX, has already been available in Japan, and I think that is why they are offering a rebate now. The new model have usb2.0 connection and a higher resolution mode (excellent) that is not possible with fi-4110.

Along that same line..

If you have access to a PC, Fujitsu's ScanSnap is somewhat cheaper and will automatically create a single large PDF file in a single pass. It will scan both sides at 150, 200 or 300 dpi resolution in a single pass and the input tray has a capacity for 50 pages. But, you can scan larger documents merely by adding more pages to the front of the input tray while it scanning documents from the back of the input tray. Note: Don't forget to remove pages from output tray periodically.

I've scanned 500+ page documents in about an hour using that technique.

Price is $389 after $100 rebate will an get you a turnkey solution for under $300.

It comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0/6.0 and scanned documents will automatically appear as one or more PDF files. User selects number of pages per PDF. You can also fire up the paper capture plug in/function and OCR the scanned images in the PDF.

Along that same line..

If you have access to a PC, Fujitsu's ScanSnap is somewhat cheaper and will automatically create a single large PDF file in a single pass. It will scan both sides at 150, 200 or 300 dpi resolution in a single pass and the input tray has a capacity for 50 pages. But, you can scan larger documents merely by adding more pages to the front of the input tray while it scanning documents from the back of the input tray. Note: Don't forget to remove pages from output tray periodically.

I've scanned 500+ page documents in about an hour using that technique.

Price is $389 after $100 rebate will an get you a turnkey solution for under $300.

It comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0/6.0 and scanned documents will automatically appear as one or more PDF files. User selects number of pages per PDF. You can also fire up the paper capture plug in/function and OCR the scanned images in the PDF.

However, every desktop scanner I've ever used takes 1-2 minutes of user-attention per page and the resulting files end up Huge, impossible-to-read, or both. All I have at my disposal is my PowerBook, Acrobat, a couple hundred dollars of department funds for a new scanner (this maybe?), and, if I ask nicely, overnight use of the secretary's Win2k box. Any ideas?

- You do need more than a couple hundred dollars, but certainly not 10x--so maybe you can talk them up a bit.

- I have one of these on my desk connected to my Mac (see note) and am sure you would be pleased with its performance. CDW sells it for $999, and I've seen it offered by one of their partners (Scantastik if I recall correctly) for under $800.

- I think that this less expensive scanner might be just fine for what you want to do. CDW has it for $480, and the Fuji web page mentions a $100 rebate.

- The problem with the hugeness of PDFs relates to the graphics file format. You can embed graphics in PDF using more than 1 format, and much software defaults to JPEG. What you want for typed or handwritten pages (no color diagrams or photos) is 1-bit TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression. That will easily get you back down to < 100K per page, often 20-30k per page at 300dpi.

Note: the fi-4120c does not come with a Mac driver; I wrote my own and it's not yet complete, thus not fit for distribution. In fact, you'll find that the kind of scanner you want is generally not supported on the Mac at all. So you definitely need to check into borrowing that Windows box.

However, every desktop scanner I've ever used takes 1-2 minutes of user-attention per page and the resulting files end up Huge, impossible-to-read, or both. All I have at my disposal is my PowerBook, Acrobat, a couple hundred dollars of department funds for a new scanner (this maybe?), and, if I ask nicely, overnight use of the secretary's Win2k box. Any ideas?

- You do need more than a couple hundred dollars, but certainly not 10x--so maybe you can talk them up a bit.

- I have one of these on my desk connected to my Mac (see note) and am sure you would be pleased with its performance. CDW sells it for $999, and I've seen it offered by one of their partners (Scantastik if I recall correctly) for under $800.

- I think that this less expensive scanner might be just fine for what you want to do. CDW has it for $480, and the Fuji web page mentions a $100 rebate.

- The problem with the hugeness of PDFs relates to the graphics file format. You can embed graphics in PDF using more than 1 format, and much software defaults to JPEG. What you want for typed or handwritten pages (no color diagrams or photos) is 1-bit TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression. That will easily get you back down to < 100K per page, often 20-30k per page at 300dpi.

Note: the fi-4120c does not come with a Mac driver; I wrote my own and it's not yet complete, thus not fit for distribution. In fact, you'll find that the kind of scanner you want is generally not supported on the Mac at all. So you definitely need to check into borrowing that Windows box.

Unfortunately you don't have much use for something like Acrobat Capture because you have handwritten notes to deal with. To process the files, SANE and/or TWAIN interfaces are reasonably easy to write code for. The cool thing about SANE is that you can run the saned daemon on any Mac or Linux box, and with a couple of lines of config file changes, it's instantly available over the network from any Mac, Windows, or Unix box (there are TWAIN bridges for Mac/Windows so it even shows up in Photoshop and so forth); there are also standalone GUI clients like XSane.

I wrote a document management system in Python/wxWidgets (for Windows) in about a month part-time, and it works very well. Either on Mac or Windows, PDF makes sense because of the ubiquity of the viewers, even if you lose a bit in compression compared to more optimized formats such as DjVu. On Windows you can easily embed the Acrobat ActiveX control; on Mac OS X you have native PDF support, Panther's Preview kicks ass, and there are several open-source PDF browsing components such as the ones out of TeXShop or Glen Low's Graphviz port you can embed in your own app.

Given a choice I would probably pick the Mac to do this project, because of the wonderful Quartz/CoreGraphics Python bindings. You can just draw right to PDF, and place PDF files as if they were images; for example, here's a short script to rotate a bunch of PDF files (sorry, Slashdot destroys Python indentation):

#!/usr/bin/python

from CoreGraphics import *
import math, sys

for inputPDFPath in sys.argv[1:]:
inputProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithFilename(inputPDFPath)
&n bsp; inputPDF = CGPDFDocumentCreateWithProvider(inputProvider)
&n bsp; if inputPDF is None:
print >> sys.stderr, \
"unable to open '%s': perhaps is not a PDF file?" % inputPDFPath
continue
outputContext = CGPDFContextCreateWithFilename(
inputPDFPath + '-rotated.pdf', None)

for pageNumber in xrange(1, inputPDF.getNumberOfPages() + 1):
mediaBox = inputPDF.getMediaBox(pageNumber)
rotatedBox = CGRectMake(0, 0, mediaBox.getMaxY(), mediaBox.getMaxX())
outputContext.beginPage(rotatedBox)
outputContext.saveGState()
outputContext.translateCTM(0, rotatedBox.size.height)
outputContext.rotateCTM(-math.pi/2)
outputContext.drawPDFDocument(mediaBox, inputPDF, pageNumber)
outputContext.restoreGState()
outputContext.endPage()
outputContext.finish()

i have a fujitsu scanpartner fi-4120c desktop scanner. only offers a page feeder, though, no scan bed, so you will need everything to be loose pages.

very fast, and will do both sides in one pass, if you are working with double-sided pages. at 200x200 resolution (you might need higher, ymmv) and scanning double sided pages, i get something like 3 seconds per page (counting one double-sided page as two pages). for software i am just using the included scanner driver and twain software and adobe acrobat.

cdw has it here, i'm sure it can be had for cheaper. i got mine for $800 i think. a little more expensive, but the speed is well worth it in time savings.

A long time ago on an ancient Macintosh I used HyperCard to deal with this. My particular problem was with technical papers and marketing literature--no matter how carefully I set up categories for filing the categories would need to change over time. So I went to a system of simple numbered folders 1-n for the physical files, and an electronic "index" that consisted of 1 HyperCard card per folder with a title field giving the theme of the folder and and a description field with more info on the actual contents. This worked very well as long as all these materials were hardcopy; then the WWW came along and I don't want to print out everything just to be able to find it again.

I went back to trying to categorize physical folders and hate this system. I'm disciplined enough that I can manage to keep a coherent system and be able to find things, but it takes so much more effort than it should. I've considered using one of the many nice outliners available for the Mac to try to manage this (NoteBook, NoteTaker, Omni Outliner, Hog Bay Notebook, TinderBox, DevonThink, NovaMind, Boswell). Although this appeals to me because I really like outlines and keep a lot of project info this way, it would still be too much work. So I'm thinking of going to a system that's all electronic. Much of my material already comes off the web anyway, and so can easily be captured into PDF format. For the rest I'm considering going to the effort to scan the paper

I've thought of putting together a simple database: something very much like my old HyperCard stack, but with a web frontend--easily slapped together with PHP some weekend. But what's holding me back is that there is a pretty large quantity of documents that fall into an obvious folder organization, and I'm not sure I want to move those off into the serialized id 1-n organization and be required to use a database to find them, when they're already in an obvious (to me only, of course) location on my disk. Yet I also don't particularly want to have 2 different systems for finding different classes of documents, when I know that the classifications will overlap and shift.

As for scanning under UNIX, there's a company that makes for various UNIX platforms commercial tookits which support the kind of scanner you'd want for this (high-speed, no need for super-high resolution). I have recently developed partial (meaning I only support the scanner features that I needed: black & white scanning using the USB port) support under OS X for a perfect (if you can afford almost $1k) scanner. I hope to put up a web page and give away a command-line utility (multi-page TIFF output) to run the scanner some time soon.

It does not seem that many manufacturers advertize the physical platter sizes, but Fujitsu is an expection: Fujitsu MAM15k RPM

I've only seen one person post about it: Magneto-Optical (often abbreviated as "MO"). It's a genuinely *reliable* removable media system.

Zip, Jaz, etc. are all crap. And Iomega sucks anyway -- their support stinks, their product quality stinks, and they'd rather spend money advertising their products than building quality into them.

http://www.ita.sel.sony .co m/support/storage/faqs/mo.html has some MO FAQs (though I wouldn't recommend a Sony drive).

The downside is that MO drives tend to be expensive, though the media is quite inexpensive. Unfortunately, they don't have much popularity in the US -- they have much greater popularity in Europe and Japan. Fortunately, the media formats are ISO standard.

Probably the best consumer-level choice for MO drives in the US is Fujitsu, but MaxOptix makes good drives in the larger, 5.25" sizes.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and at least consider MO.

(A very satisfied MO user for 5+ years).