It is wonderful what a difference it makes to have the right tools.
Years ago I obtained a thesis from the US, for which I was charged like a wounded bull. It was printed double-sided, and I had no sheet-feeder able to handle that. Today I found two very old Finereader projects on disk, neither comprising more than 70 pages, and both clearly scanned by doing a bunch, first one side, then the other. It must have been very labour-intensive, for I never proceeded further.
Anyway a correspondent caused me to look for it again. Thankfully I was able to find the paper copy. But these days I have a Futijsu Scansnap which is designed to turn bunches of papers into PDFs. It made short work of the whole document. Then I numbered the pages in Adobe Acrobat, which revealed one case where two pages had gone through. I also found that a few pages had acquired a vertical line; these I rescanned.
At the moment Adobe is OCRing the PDF for me. When it is done, I shall have a nice, compact, 400 dpi copy of the whole thing.
I hardly ever consult the thing; but at least, if I so wish, I can do so easily.
That little document reader was a splendid investment. When I think of the pain I endure with things which won’t go into it, I am deeply impressed.
There are other advances also. At my current workplace they have one of these combined scanner-printer-photocopier. It has a sheet-feeder for copies, and outputs scans to PDF. I have used it to scan a load of paper articles early one morning into PDF. But … if you look closely … it will scan A3 as well, through the same A4-looking sheetfeeder. Which means that even bulky old A3 copies – and who hasn’t got at least some of these? – can be turned into PDFs and the paper discarded!
Worth looking out for at your work. After all, it doesn’t use consumables, and is way faster than any home device. Just make sure nobody is likely to object.