Filing Papers, ct'd ct'd.

[da]

Whee that was fun. Another inch of paper onto the recycling stack, easy pickings from magazines I'd stored just for an article.

One step better than sorting paper into neatly labeled folders? Tossing the paper entirely.

Much love to Harpers.org for giving subscribers a complete online library including PDFs, NYTimes.com for opening their archives to searching (and to mac for making it so easy to save a webpage as a PDF), and to The Economist for making the last year of archives entirely free (complete with photos!) So sweet.

No love to globeandmail.com for wanting $4.95 for each article in their archive, but I suppose that's why I bought a scanner, and it was only for one article anyhow. Well, two.

While I'm at it, much love to Canon for making a scanner that does Just the Right Thing. Two button-pushes will turn a page into a OCR'd and indexed PDF which shows up in Spotlight right away. It's fairly dummy-proof too. I haven't gotten ticked off at it yet, even though I've used it for... maybe 20 articles now, and it does great on multi-page documents. (You hit one button to start the scan, the same button again for each subsequent page, and a second button to finish the document.) I suppose it could be slightly faster- it takes 30 seconds to do each colour page, but it certainly doesn't tie up the computer, so that's acceptable. Yay for digital data, yay for reducing physical clutter.

I'm surprised at how much fun I'm deriving from this closet purge.

Comments

[swadfather.livejournal.com]

good for you!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

The tough part, though, comes soon: papers I've been putting aside from the initial round that I want to keep, stuff I need to find proper folder categories for. God-willing, I can keep from putting everything into "misc". :)

[swadfather.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you what I tell my clients -- don't start a misc. folder. Decide ahead of time what the categories you will save are going to be. Otherwise, it is a slippery slope that is VERY easy to fall down.

[c0d3-m0nk3y.livejournal.com]

I recently got a flat-bed Canon scanner and my only complaint is that the TWAIN driver is a bit clunky. It is definitely a crufty Mac OS 9 era thingy recompiled for OS X. Unfortunately, if you really care about the images you make you pretty much have to interact directly with the driver.

I wanted a Nikon negative scanner, but space and dollars forced us to invest in a more general-purpose device (ecogrrl needs to scan documents, I need to scan negatives).

However, both colour and B&W negatives (and prints) scan nicely into decent-sized TIFFs, as long as you have 22 minutes to wait while it processes two strips of film.

Yes, this does mean well over an hour for a roll of film, but I'm breaking up the time by inspecting the negatives with a loupe and being a little selective about what I choose to scan.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I got a LiDE 600F, which comes with a negative-scanning attachment, but it's still in the box.

When I get around to scanning the pile of photos stashed in the other closet, I guess I'll start fighting with TWAIN drivers, if I decide I really care about TIFFs versus high-res jpegs (since my digital photos aren't RAW anyhow). My initial thought, which hasn't had any research to back it up or falsify it past trying a few test scans and liking the output, was I'd just use the built-in photo processor, which seems to do The Right Thing if you put four photos onto the bed and it outputs four jpgs.
Easy is good. :)