Paperless Office using the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 on OS X

Posted by admin on November 21st, 2008 in All
3 Comments

I have been using the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M at home for about 6 month now and it has given very good results. We are now scanning everything and it already saved my life a couple of times (i might be exagerating a bit :-)
 
To get good results, the scanner is not enough. I use DevonThink Office Pro which integrates IRIS OCR which gives very good results.

At the office however we are of course using PC’s and so I had bought the S510 (1 week after the S510M) version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap, but I must say I never really used it because I have not found a viable equivalent of DevonThink. It was also a nightmare since you had to wait for a “scan” to be completed (physical scan+PDF+OCR) before you could scan something else.
 
But now that I made “the switch“, I could finally install DevonThink on mac and go paperless at the office !

The only issue was that the ScanSnap S510 is for PC only and is not supposed to be used with a Mac. But after searching on the internet I found this nice article explaining how to get it to work anyway.

Here are the steps summarized :

  1. Download ScanSnap_V21L20.dmg from the Fujitsu Japanese website (Japanese version)
  2. Download ScanSnap_V21L11.dmg from this link (English version)
  3. Install Japanese package completely
  4. Explore contents of English package and replace the language resources as mentionned in this article
  5. Restart ScanSnap Manager and it will be in english

Now you can choose to install the software of your choice. If you need OCR, nothing rivals DevonThink Pro. If you don’t need OCR and prefer plain tagging, you can try Yep! or something alike.

Pierre

3 Responses - Leave yours here.

  • Matt

    December 15th, 2008 at 12:52 am

    Thanks for this. I just switched to a MacBook from a Dell, and I don’t want to buy a new scanner! Could you specify which verison of OS/X you have, though?

    As some of the commenters on that link say, you’ll run into some problems if you use the latest English version, numbered V22L11 (I think). The menus don’t seem to match up to the feature set on the Japanese version, which appears to be more limited and can’t (for example) use multiple scanning profiles. Not all of the on-screen buttons work, etc.

    I’m trying to muddle by in the Japanese version for now, since my partner is Japanese and can translate for me. It’s confusing, but at least it works perfectly. I’m grateful for that. If I learn anything more interesting, I’ll post again.

  • Klemen

    February 11th, 2009 at 2:57 am

    Hi, the basic principles of this are right, I just want to add a few things. I noticed that beside the ScanSnap Manager, the three Scan2Office applications that are part of the package (Scan2Folder, Scan2Mail, Scan2Print) need to get the english localization folders as well.

    For each application, view the package contents in the English distribution, copy the Enlish.plist folder under Resources, drop it in the same folder in the installed packages and remove the japanese language folders in the end.

  • Kamshad Raiszadeh

    July 23rd, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    My Mac desktop computer will not allow the Japanese version to install — it says “Cannot install on this computer”. Any suggestions?

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