My mental model of DEVONthink seems defective. I am scanning some old notebooks so I am using a sheet feed scanner instead of my usual ScanSnap. So I now have 250 PDF files sitting in binder in Imports, and I need to combine them into a single PDF file. If I select the binder, or if I select all the contents of the binder, I can’t see how to combine them. “Tools/Merge Documents” is grayed. I have looked for ‘combine PDF’ and ‘binder’ in all the documentation I have found, and I did not see anything relevant.
I am concluding that I must move all the files in the binder into some other container which enables merging documents. Yet, when I select the files in the binder and bring up the context menu, I see only Save, Move to a binder (2 choices), and Move to Trash.
So, my questions are:
- How can I combine my files?
- Is it possible to get a file out of binder once it has been put in?
- What is a binder for?
Thanks for your help.
It has occurred to me that I could send all the files in the binder to the trash, and then I could move them to some other container. Please tell me an easier way.
Why are you moving files to the Trash to act on them??
How can I combine my files?
In a binder.
What is a binder for?
The same thing your notebook is for. The binder is exactly what you wnat, just as your notebook functions as a binder. Just replace the word binder with notebook in your mind.
Is it possible to get a file out of binder once it has been put in?
Yes. If you select a binder, you can see the contents and move them around. They can be moved within the binder, to another binder, or even back out to imports.
I was being snarky about moving files to the trash. I apologize. What I really need to do is to combine all of these files, each one of which is the image of a page, into a single PDF. I can’t see how I can do that while the pages are in a binder. If I copy the pages into the Imports location that is the parent of the binder, the situations seems unchanged: the Tools/Merge Documents menu item is disabled, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to move the pages out of the Import/binder hierarchy – at least there is nothing on the context menu that seems to allow that.
I created a second window (File/New Window), so I was able to drag these files out of the binder into a normal group in the other window. The + icon showed while I was dragging. However, when I dropped it into the new group, the objected created was a text file named DTSFileURLS with “DTSFileURLS” as its only content.
Can you tell me what I should do to create a single PDF file by concatenating the separate page PDFs?
–Barry
No worries! We’ve had people try some very interesting things so… 
The Tools > Merge command doesn’t apply in the scanning interface.
Again, the binder is exactly what you want - just like your notebook is where you gathered your thoughts.
- Put the page images in the Binder.
- Check the Action menu in the lower right corner for OCR, location, tags, etc.
- If all is well, press Save.
Thanks, that did it. I had tried ‘Save’ before, but since I hadn’t set the destination, I didn’t see any evidence that it had done anything.
I’m glad I don’t need to delete everything . In my test of deleting from a binder, I could not find anything in the trash. Am I missing something there?
–Barry
The scanning interface has its own independent Trash.
