I use Devonthink Pro Office and would like to use the latest Abbyy FineReader Express for Mac with Devonthink. I my testing the new version of Abbyy is more accurate than the built-in version with Devonthink. What I would like to do is install the updated Abbyy FineReader as an add-on and replace the Abbyy Reader that came with DevonThink Pro Office. I have Joe Kissell’s book “Getting Started with DevonThink 2” as well as the documentation for Pro Office and I was not able to find any help there or in a search of forum topics.
I have considered a workflow that does the OCR outside of DevonThink Pro Office but if you un-check the “Incoming Scans - Convert to Searchable PDF” box, you can no longer “Enter metadata after text recognition”. This disrupts the workflow if I can’t enter the metadata at scan time, therefor I’d like all the OCR to be inside DevonThink.
ABBYY has not yet provided an update of the OCR module that is licensed to DEVONtechnologies. We will provide an update in DEVONthink Pro Office as soon as it is available.
In a related question, is it possible to scan documents and import them without OCR and yet enter the metadata as each document is scanned? Seems that the only way to get the metadata entry box is to scan and OCR within DT. Every other data entry technique does not offer the opportunity to enter the metadata at the time of import (I think).
I don’t know of a way to access the Document Properties fields of PDFs during scanning to DEVONthink Pro Office, without also running OCR.
I don’t use those metadata fields of PDFs, as they wouldn’t be useful in my database workflows, because they are not practically available for other document filetypes in my databases. And as I often create queue of scanner output images awaiting OCR when I’m scanning, I don’t want the queue to stop and wait for my action – so I leave the option to add metadata after text recognition unchecked in Preferences > OCR.
When I need to associate searchable metadata to a document, I use a linked rich text note, perhaps in conjunction with group organization and/or tagging. I usually want an approach that’s more flexible, less limiting and more powerful than the limited metadata fields of PDFs.
Perhaps a future version of DEVONthink will allow user-configurable metadata “fields” that work for all of the document filetypes in a database, but do not involve modification of the native filetypes of those documents.
Sorry for my ignorance…
ABBYY engine is embedded in Devonthink (DTPO)?
If I would like to update to the latest ABBYY engine (which I also payed for when I bought my scanner S1500M and comes together with the scanmanager application of the scanner) which is including ICR recognition (hand writing) and chinese character recognition, it means that this update action will have no effect to DTPO?