ScanSnap S510M on Snow Leopard

08 Nov 2009

Update: Fujitsu has posted an update on their website that addresses this issue. I’l leave this here for posterity.

For anyone looking to use the Fujitsu Scansnap S510M on Snow Leopard, you’re probably tired of the error

The file blahblahblah.pdf is not created by ScanSnap. FineReader for ScanSnap can only process PDF files created by ScanSnap.

The problem is that FineReader is checking the PDF’s creator code, and the creator code is different in 10.6 than it is in 10.5. There’s no really easy way to fix this.

But I have a fix.

Go into Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type the following commands:

wget http://static.ganon.com/pdftk
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo mv pdftk /usr/local/bin/pdftk
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/local/bin/pdftk
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/pdftk

You’ll be asked for your administrator password after the second command. This downloads a pre-compiled pdftk binary and installs it on your system.

Now download this automator workflow and double-click it. It will unzip the file and will produce a file called FixPDF.workflow. Double-click on that and Autommator will open. Click Save As and enter the name “Fix PDF”.

You will now be able to right-click on a PDF file in Finder and select “Fix PDF” from the context menu. This will fix the file and rename it adding “-fixed” at end of the file name. The fixed file can be opened with FineReader.