PDF File Mgmt. Question

Posted by Leib Moscovitz
Mar 2, 2021 at 05:54 PM

With regard to scanning and manipulating PDFs in almost every way imaginable, I very highly recommend PDF-XChange (Tracker Software); they have multiple editions, offering a very wide variety of features at different prices, which address the needs of varied types of users. I might add that their service is splendid, and their software (in all editions) is very reasonably priced.

I don’t know about their OCR, as the edition I use has limited OCR functionality, although they apparently improved this functionality significantly in the newest version. However, for really complex OCR, I recommend very highly ABBYY reader, which, judging from my experience and that of some of my colleagues who deal with such things in extension, leaves many if not all competitors in the dust.

Finally with regard to organizing your PDF files, a trick which I found extremely helpful - assuming, of course, that you organize the files in regular directories and subdirectories rather than, say, importing them into a program like UltraRecall - is to use the free four-quadrant file manage Qdir. Each quadrant can contain multiple tabs for difference directories, and you can, in effect, organize quadrants by “themes” - say, one quadrant for directories of personal files, another for academic files, another for financial files, etc. Thus, if you scan by default to your desktop, it is very easy to drag and drop the resulting PDFs into appropriate predefined locations by using Qdir’s quadrants as described above.