I have been keeping a paper based work journal all my professional life. I have a bookshelf of them. While I live pretty much on the web, I find there is nothing (yet) that can replace jotting down notes, pen on paper. I switched systems many times. Most recently, I had an inspiration -- Combine Levenger Circa notebooks with a good scanner, my SnapScan S300M, I can have the best of both worlds. I would take notes on the Circa notebook, and then scan them into PDF for electronic archiving.

Well, I finally decided to try the scanning process. What I feared came true -- the circa "holes" are not meant for a scanner's auto feeder. The leading (moving) piece of paper will snag the next sheet, resulting in a mess. Take a look at the second picture -- how it chewed up the second paper.

Fortunately, the SnapScan is good enough, and my hand-eye coordination is good enough, that I can hand continuous feed papers one sheet at t time into the scanner. It is a bit more work, but I also get over the max 10 pages at a time limit of the SnapScan.

So the system seems to work. Now if only my hand writing is good enough for some sort of OCR based PDF searching, then the system will be complete.

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