My iPhone and Macbook go to every meeting with me. And as much as one tries to be all electronic, there are times in a hall conversation where you are faced with a pen and paper to get the facts recorded. At the end of the day you have a few paper notes that are not in with your digital, searchable, notes. And, they are trapped, you are unable to share with others without a copy machine.

I have an inexpensive HP printer/scanner/fax machine that has a simple feeder. When I get home in the evening, I put the day’s documents in the machine’s feeder and scan them into my notebook as PDFs. That has been great for organizing, sharing and reviewing later. With my iPhone always handy, why not have those notes in there too.

While I always print, OCR doesn’t get it right very often so I will be looking at having images of the text documents. This does present a problem with searching, so I will need access to the name of the file as well meta information.

After playing with many different application options, I decided to keep it simple. The apps it came down to was Annotator and OneDisk. Scanned PDFs are named with the date they were written and meeting title. Since I’m on a Mac, I use Preview to join all of the weeks notes into one larger PDF also for those times I need to scan the full conversation as they relate. Lastly, since they are hand written and not typed text scans, I have found 200 DPI Gray to view the best on the iPhone.

For Annotator, I point the scanner’s output to a folder on the desktop of my notebook. To use Annotator you need to install the iPhone/Touch application and a desktop app..