I recently discovered, to my chagrin, that my awesome Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 has not only been discontinued, but is not compatible with Mojave on my new Mac Mini. I was able to scan documents, but the order of the pages was all out of whack when I looked at it in Acrobat. Obviously, I need to upgrade. I see on the Fujitsu site that there are two different ScanSnap models, the iX1500 and the iX500. At first blush, they seem very similar. Any recommendations on which to get? Is one better for a business than the other?
I use an S1500 at my office on a PC, so I’m fine for now, but will be upgrading to a Mac some time next year, so I have to have a plan in place to replace the scanner. In addition, I will need a full version PDF editor (the PC version of the ScanSnap came with Acrobat Standard). I hear a lot about PDFPen on the show (as Smile is a sponsor). Is that the best Mac app for editing and manipulating PDFs or should I go in a different direction?
There have been a number of relevant ScanSnap discussions here in the recent past; I’d suggest clicking the Search/spyglass button and checking out some of them.
I used to buy (and update yearly) PDFPen but I found that I preferred the UI and speed of Readdle’s PDF Expert for reading, annotating and signing. A summertime discussion thread about the two apps surfaced a number of other converts from PDFPen. The one disadvantage of PDF Expert is the lack of OCR. Nevertheless, I came to dislike PDFPen’s slowness and clunkiness so much that before getting PDF Expert I used the freeware Skim app - which isn’t bad!
I don’t know the workflows for practicing law, but Liquid Text is a really interesting and innovative take on annotating PDFs and exploring relations between multilple PDFs.
This ScanSnap jumbled pages bug started back with High Sierra, at least for me. I was able to resolve this on my old ScanSnap by downloading the software for a later scanner model. Right now I’m running ScanSnap Manager version 6.3 L70 under Mojave and it’s working just fine on my ScanSnap S1500M.
Agree with @Bob’s post above. Your PDF page-order problems are probably due to older Fujitsu software versions that are not compatible with recent versions of macOS. In addition to bugs introduced by Apple when changing its PDFKit framework in macOS, Fujitsu failed miserably to keep with the macOS changes. Fujitsu finally released a support weblink describing some of these problems and providing links for software downloads: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/support/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/scansnap/faq/hsierra004.html
You should use ScanSnap Manager V6.3L70. Note: don’t try to navigate through Fujitsu’s support website by selecting your model S1500 to obtain the software download; this leads to a dead end, notifying you that the scanner is no longer supported. Use the direct link above. This software is not specific to the S1500, so you may need to ignore selections for features (e.g., wi-fi support) not available in your scanner.
Agree with @bowline. PDF Expert is great. It’s only shortcoming is lack ability to add OCR to non-OCR’d documents. That’s not a big deal since you can select OCR for scanned documents through ScanSnap Manager, and PDF files obtained from other sources should already have OCR text layer included.
Think carefully about “upgrading” your scanner. New Fujitsu scanners come with new software (“ScanSnap Home”) that features unusual (for this type of device) software licensing and use restrictions. I could be wrong on certain details, but I think the software license is limited to one user and five computers. You must register or “activate” a license, and you will eventually run out of licenses if you install the software on other computers, move the software to another disk drive on the same computer, or upgrade the OS software (“clean install”) multiple times on your same computer. In other words, you are not free to use your expensive scanner freely - you must abide by Fujitsu’s unreasonable (in my opinion) software restrictions. Other users in this forum have described difficulties encountered.
Thanks for the direct link; I couldn’t figure out how to upgrade the software without it.
And a note to those who are looking to upgrade — you cannot just jump to the “L70” version. You must install the L50 and then the L61 and then the L70.
Really off-putting, but that’s typical Fujitsu. Their hardware is solid, but their software sucks and has not improved over the years that I’ve owned the scanner.