My scanner died. Well, it didn’t completely die but weird line streaks appeared on all photos that I scanned. Plus that scanner was slow. So I had my excuses ready when I decided to buy a new scanner. There were four requirements for my new scanner: (1) it had to be faster than my old one; (2) it had to be able to scan documents via an automatic document feeder (ADF) as well as be able to scan photos; (3) it had to be relatively inexpensive (to be defined when I see it) (4) it had to integrate with Evernote.
There are plenty of scanners available at all sorts of prices. The vast majority of them are document scanners which of course included ADFs but they could not scan photos. Then there were the photo scanners which could, of course, scan documents but only by feeding them one page at a time, a rather painful process I was hoping to prevent. Strangely enough, I found only one scanner that met my requirements, the Epson GT-1500. And the price was right, too.
This is not a new scanner. I believe it first came to market around 2008 so I was a bit worried about whether it was or was not supported by Windows 10. I read a number of reviews about the scanner. More than one person commented that the scanner did work with Windows 10 and that they had had no problems with it. Some people griped about the software that came with the scanner but the complaints sounded more like people issues rather than technical issues. So I bought it. Actually, I saved almost 50% of the price of a new scanner by buying a reconditioned model. Thank you, Amazon.
The scanner arrived and I installed the requisite software (this usually needs to be done before connecting the scanner to the computer; default drivers don’t recognize the hardware correctly). The software included Epson Scan (the main workhorse program that interfaces to the scanner itself) and ABBYY FineReader (a program that converts the scanned PDF document into a searchable document – it’s an OCR conversion program). It also included ScanSoft’s PaperPort 11 SE.
PaperPort is a document management program that works with different scanners, managing and storing the scanned documents (somewhat similar to Evernote). As I saw it, this would be the program that would interface to Evernote and would allow me to scan multi-page, two-sided documents (the GT-1500 does not do two-sided scanning; you have to turn the set of pages over and scan again) and merge them into the proper order (it supposedly has that feature).
I first tried scanning with Epson Scan; if this didn’t work, nothing would work. Scanning went well and very quickly. So far, I was happy. I did have an issue getting the various side buttons of the scanner to work (such as scan to email, scan to print) but then I never used these utility buttons on my previous scanner so this did not bother me. I decided to go to the Epson web site and see if there was any more up-to-date versions of the software that came with the scanner. Indeed, there was a newer version of Epson Scan so I downloaded and installed it.
Next I wanted to see if I could scan a 3 page, two-sided document and automatically shuffle the pages into the correct order. I started PaperPort and looked around for a scan button. It took a little while but I finally saw where, on the left edge of the screen, you specify the hardware scanner PaperPort should use for scanning. It had actually found the scanner by itself. The only problem was that I couldn’t scan anything. The scan button was grayed out. I went through all sorts of hoops looking for the missing magic ingredient that would enable the scan button. I couldn’t find it.
Was the problem due to Windows 10 and an old version of PaperPort? I searched the internet and surprisingly, in a Brother forum (Brother, as in the company that also makes scanners), I found a note about upgrading PaperPort support for Windows 10. You have to download the “PaperPort Scanner Connection Tool”. The details can be found here. Once I downloaded and installed the tool, the scan button worked and I could use PaperPort. But now came the next problem. PaperPort wouldn’t recognize the automatic data feeder on the scanner. I ran all sorts of tests in the program but it simply never recognized the ADF.
Maybe there is newer version of PaperPort that supports Windows 10 as well as my scanner’s ADF? The program has a pulldown menu where you can check for updates. When I pressed it, a browser window popped open but nothing happened. I tried this several times but still nothing happened. I then opened a “view source page” window to try and identify what the problem might be. In the middle of the source page view was a message saying that JavaScript was not enabled and that I must enable it for this window to work. The only problem was that JavaScript was enabled (which I even verified). I tried two additional browsers but got exactly the same error.
I went to the PaperPort web site thinking I could download a more up to date version of the software. Big surprise. The latest version is 14 and I’m on 11 SE. I spent a fair amount of time browsing their community forum and discovered that my version 11 SE is an OEM version, made specifically for scanner manufacturers. I decide to write an email to PaperPort support. This is what I sent them:
Hi. I just received my new Epson GT-1500 scanner with PaperPort 11 disk. I’m running Windows 10 and it appears that this version is very old. How do I upgrade to a supported version? And if it costs, how much? My software requirements are very simple: (1) scan documents and be able to easily and quickly upload to Evernote; (2) scan photos and upload to a specified folder. I did not see that PaperPort 11 even supports Evernote. Am I wrong? It can also be that PaperPort is overkill for my needs. Your input would be appreciated.
I received the following reply from support the following day:
Thank you for contacting Nuance Customer Service.
Regarding your inquiry, PaperPort program does not support Evernote and your version of PaperPort is not compatible with Windows 10. You might be interested upgrading to PaperPort 14 Standard for only $49.99 plus shipping and applicable tax. You may call us at 1-800-654-1187 from Monday to Friday 9:00am to 8:00pm EST to place the order.
Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
The response was puzzling to me as I had also browsed the Evernote forums and found that quite a few people were saying that they were using PaperPort with Evernote.
I needed to take a break, have a beer, and step back and really think through what I wanted and/or needed in order to successfully scan. Having read through a number of entries in the Evernote forum related to PaperPort, I discovered that Evernote had a really cool feature that I could take advantage of (I’m an Evernote Premium subscriber but I realized that I should really spend more time learning about some of the more esoteric features of the software). Evernote has an “import folders” feature: you tell Evernote that a certain folder is an import folder. Then, whenever you place a document in that folder, Evernote will automatically consume it. I tested it with Epson Scan by specifying the scanned output folder. Almost immediately after completing the scan, my PDF document ended up in Evernote. Nice.
As I mentioned earlier, the real reason I wanted PaperPort was to reshuffle multi-page, two-sided documents. PaperPort was really over-kill. I decided to solve the problem myself by writing a PDF shuffle script. But first I needed a utility that would do two things: (1) take a PDF document and break it into multiple PDF documents, one per page; (2) merge multiple PDF documents into one PDF document.
I found a very nice (and free) program called PDF Split and Merge that did just what I wanted. While there is a nice GUI front-end to the program, I was specifically interested in their command line interface. I’m not much of a Windows CMD shell programmer. I usually open a cygwin bash window when I need to script something. So my script is written in bash. It should not be difficult to convert it to either CMD shell or Windows PowerShell.
#!/usr/bin/bash
# Home of the utility
PDFSPLIT_PATH="/cygdrive/c/Program Files/PDF Split And Merge Basic"
# My home
HOME_DIR="C:/Users/jberry"
# It is assumed that the input file is located in this directory
INPUT_FILE="$HOME_DIR/Evernote/$1"
# When the input PDF file is split into multiple files, one per page,
# this is the directory where those files will be stored
OUTPUT_DIR="$HOME_DIR/Evernote/splits"
# This is the directory that Evernote uses for importing files
EVERNOTE_DIR=$HOME_DIR/EvernoteImportFolder
cd "$PDFSPLIT_PATH"/bin
export CLASSPATH=$PDFSPLIT_PATH
# Split the input PDF file into multiple files, one per page
./run-console.sh -f $INPUT_FILE -o $OUTPUT_DIR -s BURST split
#Rearrange the output files into the correct merged list
#For a 6 page scanned document, the original page order is
#1, 3, 5, 6, 4, 2
FILES=`dir $OUTPUT_DIR/*`
declare -a arr=($FILES)
NUM_PAGES=${#arr[@]}
BEGIN_PAGE_NO=0
END_PAGE_NO=$((${#arr[@]} - 1))
NUM_LOOPS=$(($NUM_PAGES/2))
FILE_LIST=""
I=0
while [ $I -lt $NUM_LOOPS ]
do
((I += 1))
file=${arr[$BEGIN_PAGE_NO]}
FILE_LIST=$FILE_LIST" -f "$file" "
file=${arr[$END_PAGE_NO]}
FILE_LIST=$FILE_LIST" -f "$file" "
((BEGIN_PAGE_NO += 1))
((END_PAGE_NO -= 1))
done
#concatinate the files in the new order
./run-console.sh $FILE_LIST -o $OUTPUT_DIR/output.pdf concat
# copy output.pdf to Evernote folder
mv $OUTPUT_DIR/output.pdf $EVERNOTE_DIR/$1
#clean up
rm -f $OUTPUT_DIR/*
Program PDF Split and Merge includes two script files, a dot bat file (run_console.bat) and a dot sh file (run_console.sh). They provide the command line interface to the various functions of PDF Split and Merge. The above script should be self-explanatory given the embedded comments. If there are any requests for it, I will be happy to create a Windows PowerShell version of the script. Just let me know.
When I finish scanning a multi-page, two-sided document, I simply call the above script with the file name of the file created by Epson Scan. When the script completes, the file has been added to Evernote.
With this script, I am now a satisfied owner of the Epson GT-1500. I also uninstalled PaperPort as I no longer need it.
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