Scanning paper documents into PDF under OS X 10.6

For a couple of years, I’ve used an HP all-in-one printer/scanner device. Up through OS X 10.5, HP provided a scanning application that made it reasonably easy to scan paper documents into multi-page PDFs. That application, however, stopped working under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The good news

The printer support in 10.6 already includes a built-in scanning application. In the Finder, navigate to your home directory, then Library -> Printers. Click on the entry for your scanner, and you’ll get a window with Printer and/or Scanner tabs (depending on the capabilities of the device). From the Scanner tab, you can scan documents into PDF or various image formats.

The bad news

If the document you want to scan is more than one page long, this Scanner app will produce a multi-page PDF only if you use the document feeder on the scanner. The document feeder is a fine solution if the documents are printed on only one side of the paper. If you have two-sided documents to scan, and your scanner doesn’t have a duplex feeder, you can use the flatbed scanning mode to scan a page at a time–but you’ll end up with a collection of separate PDFs, one per page.

Solution

I haven’t found a way to produce a multiple-page PDF in one step without either 1) getting a different scanning application or 2) getting a scanner with a duplex document feeder. I have, though, managed to automate the process of concatenating multiple PDFs into a single document.

The first step is to create an application that concatenates PDFs. This is much easier than it sounds:

1. Start up the Automator application
2. Automator will ask you to “choose a template for your workflow.” Pick the one named “Application.”
3. Drag and drop Actions from the menus on the left to create a workflow that looks like this:
   
   
4. From the Automator, save this workflow somewhere. You now have an application that concatenates PDFs.
5. Optionally, put this application in your Pictures folder, or put it somewhere else and make a symlink to it in your pictures folder.

Now that you have a PDF-concatenator application, you can use it from the Finder by selecting the PDFs that you want to concatenate and then dragging-and-dropping them onto the app.

Usage

When you scan documents from the Printer/Scanner app, they end up by default in your Pictures folder with names like Scan.pdf, Scan 1.pdf, etc. I created an empty file called Scan.pdf in that directory to make sure that all my actual scans would be named sequentially as Scan 1.pdf, Scan 2.pdf, and so on.

Based on this setup, my procedure for scanning a multi-page document into a single PDF using the flatbed scanner is:

1. Open up the Printer/Scanner window and use it to scan each page.
2. In the Finder, go to the Pictures folder.
3. Select the PDFs representing the scanned pages.
4. Drag and drop the selected files onto the PDF-concatenator application’s icon.
5. The combined document will open in Preview. From Preview, save it as whatever file name you like.

That last step–saving the file from Preview–is essential. The Automator action that does the actual concatenation puts the temporary file in a randomly-named file under /var/folders. My automator script, though, moves this temporary file to the Trash after opening it in Preview. If the document you’ve just scanned contains sensitive data, such as a bank statement, I recommend that you 1) from Preview, save your document someplace secure, like an encrypted disk image, and 2) from the finder menu, use the Secure Empty Trash operation to delete the temporary file.