Hi!
I had DT2 and OCR for my scanned documents worked fine. I just upgraded to DT3 and the OCR function does not work although I think it is properly set in the preferences. What shall I do?
BR
Paolo
The upcoming version 3.0.1 will fix an issue of the OCR preferences. Does it work after choosing a different format than PDF in Preferences > OCR and then choosing PDF again?
My old scan snap wont work with Catalina. I have ditched it and use the iphone app Scanner Pro. Works well.
Hi! It actually worked after the change you suggested.
Thanks!
I have a scansnap S510M, do you know if the software will work with Catalina?
Thanks
Which scan software do you use? ScanSnap Manager or ScanSnap Home?
ScanSnap Manager version 2.2 L 16
This version is not ready for Catalina as far as I know (and ScanSnap Home on the other hand doesn’t support all scanners).
Can I use another software?
Some users have reported good experiences with Vuescan or ExactScan. You may want to check those out.
@Paolo77 like @BLUEFROG says, you will need an alternative software to talk to your scanner with macOS releases who do not support the old ScanSnap software like Catalina.
I have a ScanSnap S300M and am in the same boat.
I have tried both Exactscan and Vuescan just yesterday, and while Exactscan could not even recognize the scanner, Vuescan did and I was able to make it work relatively easily.
It will be a slightly different workflow, but it will save you from buying new hardware, though there is a price to pay for the software.
I have yet to experiment with DT3, as I am still with DT2 at this time, but the real key factor would be to decide which application will perform the OCR on the scanned PDFs.
@BLUEFROG I have read that the OCR engine in DT3 is completely different than it was in DT2.
Would you recommend that DT3 would be performing the OCR at this time?
Many thanks,
Luca
Thanks for the support. I just dowloaded it and tried and it worked fine. As you said you need to change the workflow though but it’s not a big deal.
Thanks again.
Paolo
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@BLUEFROG I have read that the OCR engine in DT3 is completely different than it was in DT2.
Would you recommend that DT3 would be performing the OCR at this time?
It is definitely a faster and better engine than in DEVONthink 2. However, if you are using the latest version of the ScanSnap software with updated OCR, it should be essentially comparable to DEVONthink 3’s.
Thanks for your answer.
Until now I have been using the OCR part of the old 32-bit ScanSnap software, and did not use DT2 OCR much at all.
But given that my good old ScanSnap S300M is antiquated, so they say, I will need to use Vuescan to use it under macOS Catalina, so I have doing some experimenting to see how this would impact my workflow.
I am convinced that between Vuescan, Hazel, and some DT2/DT3 magic, things won’t be that different after all.
But truth be told, I have been quite happy with the ScanSnap software in the past, too bad that they decided to scrap it and leave us old timers with old scanners stuck with no official software.
Vuescan does it for me, so now it’s time to see whether it makes more sense to buy the cheaper version without OCR, or the more expensive one with OCR. I am leaning towards the former at this time.
Thanks,
Luca
Vuescan does it for me, so now it’s time to see whether it makes more sense to buy the cheaper version without OCR, or the more expensive one with OCR. I am leaning towards the former at this time.
If you’re referring to buying DEVONthink 3 Standard or Pro, I would definitely suggest Pro. 
I think he is referring to VueScan pro which has more features like OCR. I see though that the built in OCR in DT3 is very good so maybe the pro version which costs 50 USD more is not needed.
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A quick heads up on the closure of the issues with scanning and OCR in what is shaping up to be my new setup using DT3 and Catalina.
In my different tests on scanning and OCR quality, I ended up choosing this path.
I will drop the ScanSnap S300M I have as I don’t have that many paper documents to scan, and it’s not worth investing in another scanner at this time.
The scanner in my HP Officejet 5740 has an ADF, and the HP Easy Scan software supports two-sides scanning by correctly interleaving pages scanned as a stack first on one side, then reversing the stack, and scanning the other side.
I know I could do the scanning and page sorting also in DT3, but it turns out that the quality of the scanning in DT3 and also in Apple’s Image Capture tool is far worse than that of HP Easy Scan.
HP Easy Scan provides with great default settings and the page is clean and nicely white, with crisp text. Not so with DT3 and Image Capture, which tend to also capture a lot of the details of the sheet of paper, leaving a gray-ish tone to the sheet, and less defined characters.
I will be happy to provide scanned test pages if the DT3 team would like to see what I mean.
The only issue with HP Easy Scan is that at this time it does not yet support Catalina properly, and thus I have rebuilt from scratch an old laptop with High Sierra, and will use Dropbox and some Hazel rules to exchange the scanned PDF with the Catalina-based machine where DT3 will be running.
When HP will update HP Easy Scan to fully support Catalina, I won’t need to use the High Sierra machine to perform the scanning.
OCR will be performed within DT3 using a couple of Hazel rules like those described so nicely by @wmc in this great post:
Thus the option to use VueScan might be a good one for the future, if my need to use the old but still perfectly operating ScanSnap S300M would resurface.
My testing of DT3 is very successful so far, and I am just scratching the surface. I am sure that I will very soon be upgrading my DTPO license to DT3. I really like the new OCR engine!
Bye, Luca
Glad to hear it! 
Quick update, useful for those who like me have an HP scanner which can use the HP Easy Scan utility to perform the scans and then save the file.
HP Easy Scan now works under Catalina, finally!
The fixes were done by Apple and rolled out with the latest 10.15.3 update.
I can now use HP Easy Scan, which gives by far the best quality scans from my HP 5740 multifunction device, then send them to DT3 to be OCR’d using am Hazel rule.
One fewer reason NOT to upgrade my laptop to Catalina, now…
Bye, Luca
Thanks for the follow-up!
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