[Athen] Scanning and Read and Write Gold for Mac

[Sean J Keegan]

Hello all,

I have been playing with the new version of Read and Write Gold 3 for Mac to test out its functionality and general usability.  I have encountered a bit of an issue when attempting to scan, however, and wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this situation.

I have an image-based PDF document; that is, a PDF with just an image of text.  Using Read and Write Gold for Mac, I am unable to scan/OCR the PDF.  It seems that Read and Write Gold for Mac is only able to scan file types identified as "Image Files" (e.g., TIFF), but PDF does not seem be considered an "image file" type.

Has anyone else had this experience on the OS X platform?

Changing the file name is not an option (e.g., from .PDF to .TIF) as it is a multi-page PDF and Read and Write Gold for Mac would not process the file.  It would show the .TIF version as an "acceptable" file type, but would not actually *do* anything to the file.  I was able to get a single-page TIFF file to work and Read and Write Gold for Mac was able to scan/OCR the file, but this is not a real solution as there are A LOT of multi-page, image-based PDF documents.

I also tried out Read and Write Gold version 9 for Windows and it had no problems at all opening a multi-page, image-based PDF file and then performing the scan/OCR.  In fact, it actually worked far better than previous experience as did the PDF Aloud component.  That being said, using Windows is not an option (on the Mac OS and the VM Ware Windows partition is not functioning properly) and us processing alternate media is not going to work in the short term as the individual will be traveling throughout the summer months doing research.

Am I missing something on the Mac platform and what is considered to be an "image file" type?  Has anyone had successful experience using Read and Write Gold for Mac with image-based PDF documents?

Take care,
Sean