Another PDF conundrum...

[Buzz]

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.

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[C(-)ris]

Awesome. Glad you figured something out. My sugestion would have been to find a copy of Acrobat 3 or 4 for OS9 and then make some sort of Applescript to open all the documents in PaperPort and then print to PDF.

[Paul F.]

I hope you're charging them by the document, rather than by the hour... because you just "saved" your way out of some money! (Mostly kidding...) :-)

Glad you found a solution!

[Buzz]

I only spoke up because the gal was tasked w/ the project was clearly overmatched. When she first showed me what was going on, I thought it was just a couple of folders w/ about 80 and 50 documents respectively. She had started converting some of them on the G3 iMac, and had relayed how slow and painful it was. I just volunteered my FW drive to move the files to the Intel iMac, because the G3 iMac is not connected to the network. She then showed me one document, at which point I realized it was a scanned file, though I didn't initially realize just how proprietary the saved format was at the time. I rebooted the G3 into Panther and ran into the old school Graphic Converter incompatibility, but my nerd brain said there had to be a better way than converting the documents one by one on a non-networked G3 iMac running OS 9.

She wanted to go, so as I was packing up to leave, she said something about my coming back to help w/ the conversion task, which caught me by surprise; "not really my job..." IYKWIM. So I unpacked the FW drive to copy the files so I could at least attack the project from a more advanced tech environment, and as I started to copy the folders, she added, "Oh there's a couple of more folders, too..." which I grabbed and dragged onto the FW drive, and while it started to calculate the number of files to be copied, I headed for the head to take one last squirt before the long drive home (I know, TMI), and when I returned is when I found out there were thousands of files. I had expected the copying to be done, not to see 3,000 file remaining to be copied! I just wanted to straighten out some problems they were having w/ a legacy database, most of which were successfully resolved, and planned on not coming back until they digested that first round of fixes, and needed the rest of the planned tweaks done. An hour of driving each way to convert ancient OS 8.6 scanned documents was never part of the plan.

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[Paul F.]

You missed a relevant piece of info...

Was she hot? :-)

[testcase]

Paul F. wrote:
You missed a relevant piece of info...

Was she hot? :-)

:agree: