06-18-2011, 10:09 PM
Client has close to 4,000 pre OS X scanned documents in some proprietary vintage Paper Port format residing on a G3 iMac still running a rainbow Apple icon OS and using a vintage version of Paper Port Viewer to access the documents. They want all the documents PDF'ed and transfered to a new Intel iMac. Gotta shout out to Graphic Converter for saving my bacon on this one... after googling around trying to track down supposed OS X friendly PaperPort 5.6 to no avail, I read that Presto Pagemanger for OS X *might* work; which I do have, but it turned out not to work after all. Then I stumbled on a comment that Graphic Converter also sorta works. Actually, that's the first thing I tried, but evidently the older version I have on my portable FW Panther drive, that I used to boot the G3 iMac, was just too old, and didn't recognize the PaperPort format at all.
When I (finally) copied the files to the portable drive and got them back here, and tried progressively newer versions of Graphic Converter, the results were slightly more promising (after also trying various Adobe and other apps to access the files). The latest GC7 under Snow Leopard on the Mac Pro worked almost flawlessly; a couple minor hiccups in the processing, but compared to the earlier attempts, it was a walk in the park. Bottom line, about five hours, all in, to bring a bunch of 1990's documents into the 2010's. :-)
I originally thought something closer time-wise to the original PaperPort app would be prudent (due to historic software orphaning), and much of the googling centered around individually converting the PaperPort's to TIFF or PTCT and then PDF'ing which would have taken months to complete. I was (very pleasantly) surprised to discover that ancient compatibility actually got better w/ each newer version of GC that was tried. I never did find a live link to PaperPort 5.6, which evidently came w/ HP scanners several years ago. If the first glimmer of hope hadn't been shown while progressing through the GC versions last night, I was gonna post here asking for a "where to find PaperPort 5.6?", but thankfully, Graphic Converter lived up to its name and successfully converted the thousands of graphics.
///
When I (finally) copied the files to the portable drive and got them back here, and tried progressively newer versions of Graphic Converter, the results were slightly more promising (after also trying various Adobe and other apps to access the files). The latest GC7 under Snow Leopard on the Mac Pro worked almost flawlessly; a couple minor hiccups in the processing, but compared to the earlier attempts, it was a walk in the park. Bottom line, about five hours, all in, to bring a bunch of 1990's documents into the 2010's. :-)
I originally thought something closer time-wise to the original PaperPort app would be prudent (due to historic software orphaning), and much of the googling centered around individually converting the PaperPort's to TIFF or PTCT and then PDF'ing which would have taken months to complete. I was (very pleasantly) surprised to discover that ancient compatibility actually got better w/ each newer version of GC that was tried. I never did find a live link to PaperPort 5.6, which evidently came w/ HP scanners several years ago. If the first glimmer of hope hadn't been shown while progressing through the GC versions last night, I was gonna post here asking for a "where to find PaperPort 5.6?", but thankfully, Graphic Converter lived up to its name and successfully converted the thousands of graphics.
///