DEVONthink OCR /or/ ScanSnap OCR

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hello everyone!
I’m a new user of DEVONthink Pro Office
and I have a question for everyone who owns a ScanSnap scanner (mine is an iX500).

Do you prefer to use the DEVONthink Pro Office OCR function or the one integrated into ScanSnap Manager?

Option 1:
ScanSnap Manager PDF ––> DEVONthink OCR ––> DEVONthink Database
Option 2:
ScanSnap Manager PDF+OCR ––> DEVONthink Database

Could you also share your settings with me?
– Scansnap/File options & Compression
– DEVONthink/OCR/Resolution & Quality

Every opinion / advice will be very welcome!

TNX!!!

2

ScanSnap:

  • In the Save tab, leave the Image Saving folder at the default location i[/i] or choose another location.
  • On the Scanning tab, set the Image Quality to Better or Best. (Excellent should only be needed with images having fine lines, like a blueprint.)
  • On the File Option tab, set the format to JPEG not PDF, unless you are using ScanSnap Manager to do the OCR. In that case you would also check Convert to Searchable PDF too.
  • Compression should be sufficiently balanced at 2 or 3.

DEVONthink Preferences > OCR:

  • Resolution should be sufficient balanced between file size and quality at 200 dpi (300 max.). Only use Same as scan when you know the resolution of the image and it doesn’t exceed the suggested limits.
  • Quality should be balanced at 75-85%.
1 Like
3

Thank you for your suggestion, BLUEFROG!

But I noticed that if I set the format to JPEG in ScanSnap Manager, DEVOthink generates a different PDF for each page. It is not very convenient in multi-page documents.

4

True. In that case, you can set it to PDF or merge the documents in DEVONthink later.

5

Bringing this up, as I wanted to start a similar thread. Is there any difference between ScanSnap Home OCR vs Devonthink OCR? As I understand both OCR processing is handled by ABBYY, so in theory there should be no difference right?

6

Yes, there could be differences but none that would likely be of any real consequence, I’d say.

7

@BLUEFROG Thank you. The reason I am asking is because OCR and scanner integration are one of the top features of Pro license. Having ScanSnap Home that already can handle OCR, perhaps I could consider standard license in such case.

8

You’re welcome.
However, OCR is only one of many features of the Pro edition. Unless your needs are very simple, I would suggest the Pro version.

9

Sometime in the past many months, an automatic update to Scansnap Home changed its settings to automatically do OCR (Preferences > Language > Documents). I just noticed the OCR quality on a very large court document (mediocre photocopy of a mediocre printed original) was pretty bad.

Redoing the OCR in Devonthink Pro 3.9.3 gave superior results (right-click OCR > Convert To Searchable PDF, confirm convert again).

I’ve turned off Scansnap Home OCR again. (Devonthink Settings > OCR > Convert Incoming Scans has been set at To Searchable PDF all along.)

Reading through Bluefrog’s comments, I don’t understand why Scansnap would do worse than Devonthink on the same PDF?

10

By the way, the current version of DEVONthink is 3.9.4. Please make sure to say current with our point releases. There are always plenty of fixes and improvements in our releases. :slight_smile:

1 Like