Import Document Scanning Feedback

I’m using a Canon MP530 AIO’s scanner which works with Image Capture and a TWAIN interface. In addition to its separate Canon application. So with this setup, I experimented with finding the most-workable procedure for me to scan documents.

ExactScan using the scanner’s own user interface produced the quickest and best results. ExactScan by itself was close, but its scans were slower. The main advantages using the Canon software were its additional image correction and saved profiling options.

Image Capture was clunky in how it worked and had a bare minimum of manual image correction features.

OCR was seamless and consistently worked well. Of course, the best quality scans produced the best OCR results.

Here is some UI feedback and suggestions from this limited experience using DT 2.0pb3r2.

ExactScan Capture

After the Scan button is depressed the window closes and there is no indication of what’s happening. The title, author, etc., dialog finally appears after a short delay. It would be a good idea to provide a dialog or progress bar feedback while waiting. Or, at least leave the scan window open with its buttons grayed-out.

It seems only the default 300dpi Color OCR profile will produce a file in the DT Inbox. Change from Color to Gray, or the Image (print) profile, etc., and nothing happens or you get an “exceeded demo allowance” dialog.

Image Capture

Will sometimes hang with the spinning beachball at Scanned Document window. Cannot recover even after a Force Quit and must restart to regain control of the scanner.

No action from the Overview button in the Scanned Document window when Use Document Feeder is checked. It seems to put the scanner into a preview operation, but nothing is displayed. What does “Overview” mean? Typical scanner parlance is “Preview” even though “Overview” happens to also be used in Image Capture for a preview.

The Add Page button is not intuitive in scanning a first page. Why not “Scan”? But the Add Page button (the one in the toolbar) does do what is expected.

The Store button (in the toolbar) is not particularly intuitive. How about “Save”? You are expecting it to be saved (stored) in DT as you would saving an edited RTF, PDF, etc.

After clicking the Store button, the Set button in the title, author, etc., dialog is also not intuitive. Why not “Save”?

After the Set button, the scanned entry appears at the top level of the selected database. Why not into the Inbox? Or, into the same Group from which the Import command was initiated? Or, a dialog for a save location that will retain it last entry – select the location once and subsequent entries will default to that same location?

Thank you for your feedback, we have just updated the Image Capture plugin so some of your remarks have been taken care of already and will be visible in the next public beta. Other issues you brought forward are not possible because of the limitations of Image Capture. Furthermore, if you want to have full control over the scanner settings and image output we recommend either ExactScan or the application that shipped with your scanner.

I will forward your comments regarding ExactScan to the ExactCode team.

Actually the ExactCode team is at CeBIT and asked if you could make screenshots of those “demo limit exceeded” dialog boxes because they’re not supposed to be there! You can send them to me: ab [at] devon-technologies.com. Thanks!

I tried but could not duplicate that “exceeded demo allowance” dialog. It probably had happened after scan attempts had reached some threshold in number of attempts or repetitions. Those attempts where nothing happened had started to add up.

Another dialog not mentioned that did appear on occasion was: “An invalid number was specified. Specify a valid number.”

There are distracting, superfluous settings in ExactScan Capture that do not pertain to the task of getting documents in DTPO. Also settings not explained. For example, the involved file naming and image format options seem superfluous. And, how to sample (drag?) colors for the black and white point settings might be useful but are not explained.

ExactScan Capture is the “light version” of their (i.e. ExactCode) flagship application. It’s is limited in the sense that some features are not enabled because it will only work with DEVONthink Pro Office. However, in many cases it gets the job done when Image Capture scanning is not functional.

Some of your comments regarding the latter have been incorporated in the upcoming release of our scanner plugin. I hope you’ll be pleased with the result.

Comment: Canon has updated the drivers for at least some of their scanners for OS X 10.5 compatibility. For some models, the updated driver no longer works with their ToolBox scanner software. However, I’m getting improved performance with the latest driver for my CanoScan LIDE 500F.