I have been using DTP for over a month now, and I love it so far. It has made my life much easier. That said, I am not a fan of my scanner (an HP Scanjet 8270). It doesn’t let me scan into DTP. Rather, I have to scan to a folder with an action that I created to automatically scan into DTP. It works most of time, but it’s a bit clumsy.
I might get a new scanner, but I can’t seem to find a list of scanners that are known to work with DTP. I don’t want to guess and get a scanner that isn’t compatible. I need a workhorse of a scanner that an auto-sheet feeder that can handle about 50 pages, and a flatbed scanner, and is fast. I scan a bunch of documents a day. I’d also like the option of duplex scanning. So, what should I get?
I was looking on Avision’s website, but when I clicked on their scanners, they didn’t show MacOS X as a supported OS. However, you mention them on your website. What gives? They seem to have some nice scanners, but I can’t take a chance that it doesn’t work if I purchase one.
It’s probably not feasible for DEVONtechnologies to develop a list of scanners that do/do not work with DTPO’s Image Capture and/or ExactScan Capture routines.
But it appears that some scanner manufacturers interpret the Image Capture “standard” rather loosely, so that you may find that a particular scanner whose driver software uses Image Capture will nevertheless not be controllable by DT Pro Office, although they can send scanner output to a Finder folder using their own driver software.
For cases where the scanner isn’t directly controllable by DT Pro Office either in the Image Capture or ExactScan Capture mode, but can send scanner output to a Mac’s Finder folder, here’s an approach that will automatically send scanner output to DT Pro Office for OCR and storage of a searchable PDF:
However, there’s another way to set up your scanner to send scanner output (preferably PDF) to a folder in the Finder, which will then result in automatic OCR by DT Pro Office.
Create a new Finder folder that is to receive your scanner’s output. For the sake of illustration, I’ll call that folder “Harry”.
In the Finder, Control-click on “Harry” and choose the contextual submenu “Services”, then select “Folder Actions Setup”.
Choose the script named “DEVONthink - Import, OCR & Delete”. You will find this script at ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/.
Attach that script to “Harry”.
Now operate your scanner using its provided driver software after configuring it to save scanner output to “Harry” (PDF is a good format choice). DT Pro Office should be running.
Each time a new scanner output file is saved into “Harry”, the attached Folder Action script will send it to DT Pro Office for OCR and storage of the resulting searchable PDF, then send the original image file to the Trash. The folder “Harry” will therefore be emptied as each image-only PDF is sent to it and then forwarded to DT Pro Office for Import and OCR.
As the late Senator Russell Long of Louisiana once said, “There are more ways to kill a cat than by stuffing it with butter.”
A grisly image, perhaps, but illustrative of the kinds of interoperability provided in OS X, in this case though AppleScript.
