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Posted by Graham Rhind
May 10, 2007 at 03:13 PM
Thanks Tom - you’re right, I crave elegance (speed and power in adding keywords, apart from anothing else) - but I didn’t know that those properties were there! Useful and simple ...
Addendum about PaperPort - PaperPort will only work within its “own"directory, so all files created outside it can’t be indexed or searched. Another reason to look for an alternative ...
Tom S. wrote:
>
>My gut feeling is that you are looking for something
>more elegant but I do have a rough solution for you. In Windows XP, if you right click on
>the icon for your document and go to the “Summary” tab you will see fields for
>“Categories”, “Keywords”, and “Comments”. I have been known to keep text files on my
>desktop with categories and keywords listed for easy copying and pasting. The
>“Comments” field could be a place to put your snippets. These fields are searchable,
>at least with Windows Desktop Search. The other indexing search programs like X1
>might do it as well.
>
>Again, not terribly elegant but it is (almost disappointingly)
>simple.
>
>Tom S.
Posted by Chris Murtland
May 10, 2007 at 03:39 PM
At least in more recent versions of PaperPort (I have version 11), you can add any folder to show up and be managed in PaperPort - go to Tools -> Folder Manager.
One disappointing thing about PaperPort is that you can’t scan to standard searchable PDFs with it - it will OCR and index scans for its own internal search engine using the basic product, but to make a standard text PDF (not image), you also have to have OmniPage Professional - which is $499. Ouch. As far as I can tell, this limits the usefulness of PaperPort in conjunction with external desktop search engines and other software that searches PDFs. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
I need to look for cheaper alternative scanning software that would scan and OCR to a normal text PDF. I don’t deal with a huge amount of paper, so it’s kind of on the back burner, but there has to be something out there. I’m pretty satisfied with Ultra Recall, but I would love to be able to drop scanned pdfs into it and actually be able to search the text content.
Check out this thread on the UR forum for a possible approach for UR users (and probably for desktop search engine users as well) : http://tinyurl.com/2pay7f - Microsoft Office Document Imaging creates tiffs that have their text info from OCR stored with them.I haven’t done a lot of testing with this, but it seems to work okay.
Chris
Posted by dan7000
May 10, 2007 at 03:45 PM
I’ve been using IdeaMason heavily for 2 months now, and I’m pretty disappointed.
It won’t work for what you want to do, because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t really handle external documents well at all. There is a special “documents” tab that holds external documents, but those are not integrated into the rest of the program at all. In other words, that tab is nothing more than a link list. You can’t associate any comments or even a citation with the external doc.
And, most disappointingly for your purposes, those documents can’t be searched.
One work-around is that you can create a “library” item, which has a “source on the web” tab, and view your external document there—it allows you to enter a local file:: url. Library items can have comments and citations associated with them, so that solves that problem. But you can’t easily view your document outside of their viewer, and, again, IM search does not search within the external document.
IM has a lot of other flaws for what it’s supposed to do. I used it to research and write a major paper for my final year of law school, which is due tomorrow. I was really excited about it, and thought that it would help structure my writing process. But it just slowed me down, and continues to do so, because of all the work-arounds I have to use—and because it is so painfully slow. However, I do think it’s a nice concept, and someday I’ll write the IM folks with my wish-list and see if they’re responsive.
One suggestion for Graham: what about Google Desktop Search? It gives you a preview of the search results inside the document, which is awesome. For Outlook emails it even caches the entire email so you can view it in the browser instead of launching outlook. And I find it is about 1000 times faster than Windows Search - plus Windows search doesn’t preview the results and when I turn Windows indexing on it really slows down my machine.
Posted by Graham Rhind
May 10, 2007 at 04:06 PM
Chris Murtland wrote:
>At least in more recent versions of PaperPort (I have version 11), you can add any
>folder to show up and be managed in PaperPort - go to Tools -> Folder Manager.
Thanks Chris - I had found that one it seems - and then forgot about it again :-)
>One
>disappointing thing about PaperPort is that you can’t scan to standard searchable
>PDFs with it - it will OCR and index scans for its own internal search engine using the
>basic product, but to make a standard text PDF (not image), you also have to have
>OmniPage Professional - which is $499. Ouch. As far as I can tell, this limits the
>usefulness of PaperPort in conjunction with external desktop search engines and
>other software that searches PDFs. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m wondering whether standard text pdfs would work for me, as my documents contain many languages - though the pdfs that PaperPort produce are not ideal, at least I can be sure to see what was on the paper. Oh, and I should say, re-scanning isn’t an option - apart from the time limitations, most of the original stuff has been recycled :-)
Graham
Posted by Graham Rhind
May 10, 2007 at 04:10 PM
Thanks for this Dan. I have always been a little wary about starting working with IdeaMason - I always had a feeling that it would take me longer to learn how to work with the program than it would save in the writing process. You seem to be confirming my suspicions. I was wondering how well external documents were supported, so thanks for the information on that!
Graham
dan7000 wrote:
>I’ve been using IdeaMason heavily for 2 months now, and I’m pretty disappointed.
>
>It
>won’t work for what you want to do, because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t really handle
>external documents well at all. There is a special “documents” tab that holds
>external documents, but those are not integrated into the rest of the program at all.
>In other words, that tab is nothing more than a link list. You can’t associate any
>comments or even a citation with the external doc.
>And, most disappointingly for
>your purposes, those documents can’t be searched.
>
>One work-around is that you can
>create a “library” item, which has a “source on the web” tab, and view your external
>document there—it allows you to enter a local file:: url. Library items can have
>comments and citations associated with them, so that solves that problem. But you
>can’t easily view your document outside of their viewer, and, again, IM search does
>not search within the external document.
>
>IM has a lot of other flaws for what it’s
>supposed to do. I used it to research and write a major paper for my final year of law
>school, which is due tomorrow. I was really excited about it, and thought that it would
>help structure my writing process. But it just slowed me down, and continues to do so,
>because of all the work-arounds I have to use—and because it is so painfully slow.
>However, I do think it’s a nice concept, and someday I’ll write the IM folks with my
>wish-list and see if they’re responsive.
>
>One suggestion for Graham: what about
>Google Desktop Search? It gives you a preview of the search results inside the
>document, which is awesome. For Outlook emails it even caches the entire email so you
>can view it in the browser instead of launching outlook. And I find it is about 1000
>times faster than Windows Search - plus Windows search doesn’t preview the results
>and when I turn Windows indexing on it really slows down my machine.