Extracting Date from Invoice or letter and use it as Name

DEVONthink Automation
1

Hi,
is it somehow possible to extract the date from an invoice or letter in an pdf to use it as part of the filename?
I’am new to the scripting abilities…

Thanks a lot

2

It’s definitely doable but DEVONthink’s AppleScript suite doesn’t support this yet, therefore it would require more work and parsing the text of documents via AppleScript might be slow. A future release will probably support this though.

3

Although not a scripting approach, here’s a tip for saving typing when doing manual renaming of documents:

Select a text string that would be useful in the document’s Name, then press Control-Command-I. That’s useful when renaming scans of journal articles, for example, as the title of the paper can be selected in the searchable PDF and quickly made the document name, without having to type it.

Here’s another tip for helping organize scans of paper copy from a variety of sources:

Create a new database named, for example, Incoming Scans. Within that database I created some 33 smart groups that collect the documents from common sources, such as invoices or receipts from vendors, etc. I usually set ScanSnap Manager to name documents as YYYYMMDDTime and turn off the option in DEVONthink Pro Office Preferences > OCR > Enter metadata after text recognition. That lets me run through a large number of paper documents quickly in a scanning session, without being slowed down by having to enter a document name for each.

Often, I’ll scan a large stack of paper as individual documents. Those smart groups pull together documents appropriately by category or source, which makes it much quicker to file them later into appropriate database and group. After moving out the contents of each smart group to their final filing destinations I will likely find some remaining items that didn’t fit into any smart group, each of which may require individual attention for filing. I’ve still saved a lot of time.