Tips for Paralegals and Litigation Support Professionals – March 2022 | Association of Certified Electronic Discovery Specialists (ACEDS)

MARCH 5, 2022: Find which PDFs are not text-searchable

If you have a very large number of PDF files and you don’t know which files contain searchable text, you can configure an Adobe action using the preflight tool to find files that do not contain searchable text. no or very few text objects.

In the Action Wizard, add the Preflight option from the Document Processing menu:

Click “Specify settings” for the preflight action, and in the dialog box, select the “Acrobat Pro DC 2015 Profiles” option

Then, in the long menu on the right, select the option “List of objects on the page, grouped by object type”

Choose the option to create a report for successes or errors and set a folder for these reports, then check the box to display a summary in PDF format.

Also choose the option from the Save and Export menu to save each file processed by Preflight. Click the icon to the right for the option to set a specific local folder in which to save the reports.

When executed, the action gives you the option to add multiple files:

The action will generate a portfolio PDF with multiple PDFs for each original PDF. Select all the PDFs in the portfolio, then right-click and select the option to extract each PDF from the portfolio.

Then combine the reports into a single PDF file, and then save the text of the report to a text file. . .

Open the text file in a text editor and run a find and replace to make sure the captions, ‘File name:’; ‘Way:’; ‘Text objects’; The “vector objects” each appear at the beginning of a new line.

Then paste the text into column A of an Excel spreadsheet. In column B enter this formula:

=IF(LEFT(A2,4)=”Path”,”,”,IF(LEFT(A2,12)=”Text Objects”,A2,B1))

. . . start in cell B2, then scroll down using CTRL+D. In cell C2, do the same with this formula:

=IF(LEFT(A2,9)=”File name”,A2,””)

Note that in reports, the number of text objects for a file is listed before the file name.

When you filter the entries in column C, you see the number of text objects in each file:

Keep in mind that a file that contains a lot of text that still needs to be OCRed may have a few text objects used in an exposure slip sheet, headers, footers, etc. Examine any file that contains a small number of text objects based on the total number of pages.

03/12/2022: CaseMap full-text search error

One of the cool features of CaseMap is that by default it generates OCR text for all documents that have been linked to objects. When a user works in CaseMap, he creates a search text that all other users can use. On the Case Tools tab, under the Case Index menu, you will find the option to review the OCR status of any linked document in CaseMap.

The “Unindexed” tab will indicate which files are waiting to be OCRed and which cannot be OCRed.

The first tab shows which files have not yet been added to CaseMap’s search index.

If no user has enabled the OCR feature, a note will appear in this dialog saying that someone needs to enable it

If you get this error message when trying to perform a full-text search. ..

This means that you do not have write permission for the ‘Index’ subfolder directory in the CaseMap network folder.

Someone with rights to this folder will need to update the search index.

03/18/2021: Internet connection on the rail from New York to DC

I’m on vacation this week, so I’m going to post a quick note about working while traveling. The Acela train from New York to Washington, DC has no shortage of business travelers – many of whom are lawyers. If you were wondering if it was convenient to work on a laptop while traveling, the answer is unfortunately no. Tried to connect using both my T-Mobile hotspot and then Amtrak WiFi. Although I was able to access several websites, they were loading slowly. I reached remote desktop and was able to open documents, but the lag in selecting and opening emails was too long to make the effort worthwhile.

When I first connected to my smartphone’s hotspot, I had to restart before I could connect Windows 10 to WiFi.

If you’re very patient, you can do some work, but it’s a struggle.

03/25/2022: High volume degaussing

the Tip of the evening of April 28, 2022 discussed how degaussing disrupts the magnetic field of hard drives and tapes, erasing stored data. There are high-volume degaussers that can erase hundreds of devices in an hour. Data Security, Inc. markets a machine which can both degauss and physically destroy drives fed to it on a treadmill.

Keep in mind that an SSD cannot be degaussed because it does not store data magnetically.