Devonthink Pro Office Scan to Excel Script

Magazines often have paper based supplier/contact lists. Rather than manually typing each entry could I scan each page and have Devonthink Pro Office OCR convert this into excel through a script :question:

I cannot speak for what others have managed to get right through DTP(O), but do know that with something like Hazel http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php, combined with 3rd party applications like PDFPenPro, this should be possible…

Where things might get very tricky, would be the ‘format’ of that list, inside your magazine…

AFAIK, automating the OCR process, specifically with a view to extracting usable text from within that document, and then “feeding” it into somewhere else, is largely dependant on the consistency of your source format.

By this I mean, Hazel et al works well with a utility bill, since the date [data text you want extracted] is virtually always in the same place, follows the same construct-order, consists of the same pattern etc. This makes it possible for Hazel et al to identify the text-string you want to work with, given the set parameters you have created, and work its magic…

In your scenario, if that list varies in content, size etc., then I think things will be very tricky to automate.

Of course - I could be wrong about all of the above, so rather wait and see what everyone else thinks! :stuck_out_tongue: