Can't convert pdf to searchable

I have a large tiff file (250 page document) I want to import into DTPO (b3). Since OCR is limited to 50 pages, I went to Preview and printed it as manageable chunks in pdf format using the SavetoDevonThinkPro.scpt script in Preview.

After this, I attempted to convert to a readable pdf using Convert to Readable in DTPO. The OCR Print Status window stayed open for some time while opening the file, then failed during OCR. The error log says, “The original record for this OCRed document has been deleted!” However, when I look at the package in the location specified in the log, the file is there.

Curiously, the first two pdfs I generated from this tiff file converted fine yesterday, while I had Preview still open. Any idea why the rest are not converting today? Is DTPO somehow looking somewhere else for the original pdf? Any troubleshooting hints?

For some reason, that original record that you used to start the OCR with can’t be found. But this is not the cause of your problem, because it is only used to copy the meta data to the new record. Did you delete the original, rebuild the database or otherwise change anything regarding that record while the OCR was running?

But can you specify what “Failed during OCR” means? Did you get a result file? If not, are there any other warnings? You should at least see a panel informing you that OCR failed for some reason. Or if it can’t be imported, you should see a panel asking you to check the result in the Finder. Last but not least the Console may log some stuff (see Applications > Utilities > Console).

If all this didn’t happen, you can always check the History tool to see what happened in your database. The result of the OCR process should be listed there as an addition.

The panel gave the following error message for the OCR failure:

“The original record for this OCRed document has been deleted!”

However, the file it references (in the .dtbase package) is, in fact there. I did not touch it during the OCR process.

The console has the following messages:

2007-02-02 11:15:20.575 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]
2007-02-02 11:22:19.417 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]
2007-02-02 11:30:12.816 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]
2007-02-02 11:37:50.080 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]
2007-02-02 11:44:55.946 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]
2007-02-02 11:48:24.706 DEVONthink Pro[4557] Received RDE 11.5.app error reply [1011]

Does any of this help?

Well, something doesn’t work in the OCR module. What happens if you restart our application and try again?

The application restart did the trick. Thanks: I’ll be sure to try that in future as a standard troubleshooting technique.