Scan Paper Documents with Your Mac

Posted inGeneral, TipsNo Comments

It’s a beautiful thing to go completely paperless when it comes to personal documents. No more monthly statements, yearly declaration packets, and other junk cluttering your space. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to finally digitize old accrued papers. It’s like a weight loss program for filing drawers– let’s feel the burn! 📄🔥

Did you know that you can scan papers by taking photos with your iPhone? The results are pretty good. There’s some filtering that increases contrast to hide lighting irregularities and sharpen text. You can add scans on your iPhone using the Notes app.

What’s even nicer is that you can initiate scans from your Mac using something called Continuity Camera. This mode will save the scan results directly to your Mac. Here’s the incredibly useful workflow:

1. Switch to the Finder and right-click on the Desktop or any other folder.
2. Choose the contextual menu command Import from iPhone > Scan Documents
   → Scanning mode will be activated on your phone.
3. Using your iPhone take photos of your paper documents, and click Save when finished.
   → A PDF file will be saved to the folder you used in step 1 above.

The resulting PDF will contain all of your scans, one photo per PDF page.

Nisus Writer Font Previews

Posted inNisus Writer Express, Nisus Writer Pro, TipsNo Comments

Nisus Writer’s font menu has long been WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, for any kids out there). But that isn’t always helpful. You don’t want to see how a list of font names will look. You actually want to see how your text will look.

This is where Nisus Writer’s font preview can help. For example, let’s say that you select a text equation in your document and use the menu Format > Font > Show Font Previews. You’ll see a dialog like this:

This dialog lets you pick a great looking font for your particular text. The previews also take into account whatever other formatting is already applied to your text, e.g. font size, color, underline, etc, so you can maximize WYSIWYGNESS and save yourself a bit of fiddling time.