Hi,
I feel kind of stupid 
because I’m sure there’s an easy answer to this question, but how do you rotate a PDF within a DEVONthink database?
I just want to rotate the document 90 degrees. Can I do so within DEVONthink, or do I have to do it ahead of time in the document before it’s imported?
TIA,
Robyn
Robyn, you can rotate a PDF you’ve already captured (Imported) into your database.
Select DT Pro’s Scripts > Images and check the options.
I don’t have any Indexed PDFs to check whether the script works on them, too. If not, just open the external PDF in Preview and select Tools to rotate the PDF, then save it.
That seemed to work. Thanks!
Sigh. I’ve been doing this a lot as I have been scanning thousands of pages into DTPro.
Unfortunately, the “Rotate” scripts and the “Landscape/Portrait” scripts (what’s the difference between those, anyhow?) only seem to act on the first page of a multi-page PDF document. The rest of the pages are deleted, never to be seen again.
I just discovered this today, after scanning then rotating hundreds of pages in multi-page PDFs. And since I’ve had a trash pickup since scanning most of those pages, they’re really gone for good. Sigh.
Learning curve. Learning curve.
I had that problem, too. Now I either save to pdf using landscape view or rotate it before it gets imported into DEVONthink Pro. Still, that’s a pain. Where do those pages go?
I’ve only used the script on single-page documents that were not run through OCR. The script causes no problem in that case.
I tried the script to do a rotation or portrait-to-landscape conversion on a copy of a previously imported multi-page PDF that contained text. After conversion only the first page image remained. But the text was still in the database. But the text can now only be read by converting the “one page” PDF to plain text.
So I wouldn’t advise using the scripts on multi-page PDFs. 
I’m doing a lot of scans using a Fujitsu ScanSnap and a beta version of DT Pro that automatically performs OCR and saves the PDF+text document to my DT Pro database. The ScanSnap requires that documents be inserted in Portrait mode. But the process is smart enough to recognize pages that are in Landscape mode, and rotate them to display properly in the database. Everything works properly, even in documents that mix Portrait and Landscape orientation in a document.
This special version of DT can also perform OCR on PDFs that are image-only, if they have been saved at a sufficiently high resolution (300 dpi is good). So previously scanned PDFs can be run through OCR at a later time.
Tease.
And, Christian? I make a good beta tester. I can break anything… and take good notes in the process!
I’m in the process of scanning in boxes of documents, and as other people have pointed out, the OCR is far too slow. So I’ve been using my ScanSnap to scan them to a file and import into a special folder “No OCR”. Unfortunately I discovered that they are not rotated correctly. I suppose I could rotate them first in preview and save (although in most cases the first page is turned at 90 deg to the rest), but that’s a pain. It would be VERY helpful to have a rotate page function in view mode built into DTP.
Thanks.
OCR is a resource-intensive operation. So the more resources on your computer (CPU speed and amount of RAM), the faster OCR goes. I find DTPO OCR faster and more accurate than using Acrobat 7 for OCR.
Tip: If the option to add document attributes is checked in Preference > OCR, the operation pauses after each document has been scanned and OCR’d to wait for user entry of information. Uncheck the document attributes option and one can scan a number of documents. The OCR queue will then proceed without interruption until all scans have been processed and saved. Document titles, keywords etc. can be added later within the database.
While a queue of PDFs is running through OCR one can do something else, such as responding to email or that perennial favorite, Solitaire.
The combination of ScanSoft and OCR generally removes the need to rotate images, as the software will correctly rotate landscape text/tables. Always place paper into the ScanSnap in Portrait orientation.