I am trying to cut down on the large amount of paper in my office and am looking for something to help me to scan, ocr and index the thousands of documents that I have here.
In the Devonthink help it indicates that I should be able to capture paper using an unsupported scanner (I’m using an HP Color Laserjet 281) by getting my scanning application to send to Devonthink. I can configure the scanning application to do that, but nothing shows up in Devonthink. Where would I expect a scan to appear - my initial guess was in the inbox of the currently-open database, but nothing appears. Can anyone suggest where it might have gone?
The other approach, which I am happy to take, is to scan my paper documents into business folders on my computer as PDFs and then import using OCR. I tried that, and it only seems to be able to pick one PDF at a time; I’d really like to select the top-most folder and process all of the child folders and documents. Am I able to use Devonthink to do this?
Any help much appreciated; Devonthink looks like a very sophisticated application, and I’m hoping that I have just missed the functionality I’m looking for in the complex UI.
Following up on my last question, I note that DT is compatible with “ScanSnap” scanners. There are a few of these on the market; can anyone tell me whether the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1500 can be used from within DT to scan/ocr/import documents?
By default it should be in the global inbox. What’s selected in Preferences > Import > Destination?
How did you actually import the folder? By default the folder and all its contents (including subfolders) should be imported.
Yes this scanner is supported by DEVONthink.
Hi, thanks for the quick reply. My setting for Destination is “Global inbox”.
For importing, I chose two different approaches. First I tried File > Import > Images (with OCR). This wouldn’t import a folder. Instead, it just opened the folder. I could multi-select files in a folder, and these imported to my inbox. However, I don’t know where they were OCRed. Maybe they didn’t need to be, if they were selectable PDFs.
The second approach used File > Import > Files and Folders… This does seem to import all of the files in all of the child folders. OK, my error. That will work for existing PDFs.
I’m still a bit hazy about the workflow if I want to scan, say, a year’s worth of bank statements. IIRC the scanning end of the process defines Devonthink as the receiving application for the scans, but not a destination folder. Will they all end up in the inbox, and do I then have to refile them into the relevant folder? Will Devonthink automatically OCR the text from the PDFs?
Apologies if these are dumb questions; I am still grappling with the basics in DT.
Smart rules could be used to move/classify/file the documents.
Only File > Import > Images (with OCR) does this always, incoming scans are on demand processed (see Preferences > OCR). But a smart rule could be also used to process only those PDF documents after importing which are not yet searchable.