Import with OCR Stalling

I fed DThink a 123 page file (a film script) in a pdf format. It wailed away on it for a while incrementing it’s processing until page 23. There it sat for 45 minutes. When I went to quit the program, it asked me whether I wanted to complete the processing. Sure, I thought, and let it continue. I saw a process named something like pdf2tiff working away when I looked at it in istat pro.

But eventually I quit it.

Is there a way to see what is going on, have it to the conversion, or correct my approach?

– Gerry

Are you able to OCR only this page or does it stall too? E.g. open the PDF, select the page in the sidebar, copy it and then create a new PDF document containing this page via Data > New from Clipboard.

Real life has kept me from testing this. But while doing other stuff this afternoon, I note the pdf2tiff is taking 84-98% of the processing (again according to istat pro). This, even when I’ve quit DThink. Did DThink launch this, as I assumed, during the conversion process?

– Gerry

It’s probably used by Abbyy’s OCR engine. Are you running out of real memory? E.g. have a look at the memory statistics (especially page ins/outs) in the Activity Monitor (see /Applications/Utilities).

No, I don’t think I was running out of memory. But it sure was busy doing something!

I logged out and back in again and it was still whaling away at some nameless task. I went into Activity Monitor, killed it and it stayed killed.

I assume it was Abbyy as the first time I’d ever seen it was after the conversion episode.

– Gerry