Inferno_str1ke & Ashley,

I bought a canon pixma all in one printer scanner just for that purpose. After having it used to digitize a lot of filling documents I do recommend it to anyone. There is also an expensive machine that just do that: you feed it paper and it automatically converts them to pdf. with the canon printer I have you use a supplied software to convert images to pdfs which isn’t too bad. you can feed about 30-35 papers at a time. One crucial component of this is using a program that tag your files/documents so that when you have too many of them then you can easily search and retrieve them. for that I use a program called tag2find which is completely free and does an excellent job in tagging various files del.i.cious style. I also use axCrypt free program to encrypt files that have sensitive information. I wrote about this in cybernet forum as well. check it out.

Thanks for the tip Wolfe! I like the idea of a program to tag the documents that you scan. Otherwise it could become pretty tedious trying to find what you’re looking for.

I bought a canon pixma all in one printer scanner just for that purpose. After having it used to digitize a lot of filling documents I do recommend it to anyone. There is also an expensive machine that just do that: you feed it paper and it automatically converts them to pdf. with the canon printer I have you use a supplied software to convert images to pdfs which isn’t too bad. you can feed about 30-35 papers at a time. One crucial component of this is using a program that tag your files/documents so that when you have too many of them then you can easily search and retrieve them. for that I use a program called tag2find which is completely free and does an excellent job in tagging various files del.i.cious style. I also use axCrypt free program to encrypt files that have sensitive information. I wrote about this in cybernet forum as well. check it out.

This seems very cool. Only today I was sitting at the PC thinking about how I was going to have to find some way to type up all the various notes I’ve made, lists, funny things etc. Using technology like this would be great – an instant paper copy for physical use around the place, but a permanent record of it on the computer for searching with meta data such as who wrote it and the time it was written. It would be cool if the detector was the pen – then anything you wrote anywhere around your PC could be logged.

Incidentally, do you know of any small scanners that behave like a fax machine rather than a flat bed – I’m looking for something that I can just feed paper into and have it produce PDF files, as opposed to having to put things one by one on a flatbed and scan them?

That’s funny you ask that because just the other day Ryan and I were talking about this because I had several documents I wanted to scan. I know such scanners exist, but the really nice ones are normally for businesses and typically fairly expensive.

One inexpensive option is [accessories.us.dell.com] from Epson. It says you can load up to 30 sheets.

It is very cool, but I agree that it’s not very practical and probably wouldn’t be something that the general public would embrace as they’ve done with regular post-it notes.

Incidentally, do you know of any small scanners that behave like a fax machine rather than a flat bed – I’m looking for something that I can just feed paper into and have it produce PDF files, as opposed to having to put things one by one on a flatbed and scan them?