As I mentioned in my article on filing with a virtual assistant, I need to preserve the timestamps from the original PDF so I can quickly locate the original documents if necessary.
You’ll recall the originals are sitting in a manilla folder, sorted in the order they were scanned. If I preserve the timestamp from the original batch, I can quickly locate the original (“hmm, this document is from a batch about a third of the way in…”). If not, I’d have to wade through the entire folder.
In theory, I could physically file the originals in some appropriate semantic order e.g. date and sender. In practice, I seem to lack some necessary gene. Hence: virtual filing.
So, how do we preserve the time stamps?
On a UNIX-like system, including Mac OS X, you can use the ‘touch‘ command to copy the timestamps from the original big PDF to each little PDF. On Windows, you could install cygwin and use the same command.
Instead of cygwin’s touch, I’ll probably write a Python script to perform the time stamp management and a little more of the heavy lifting, e.g.:
- Create a subdirectory named after the original PDF
- Move the original PDF into it, renaming it ORIGINAL
- Mark the original read-only
- Wait for the user to declare s/he’s finished
- Clone the original’s time stamp to all the files
- Zip the files up
- Delete the subdirectory
If I do write such a script, I’ll publish it on bitbucket as I write it.
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