Making PDF's searchable after they are scanned

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi

Scansnap does excellent text recognition, however, it takes too long if you have a lot of documents. Is there a way that I scan files into PDF and pdf+ (Searchable text) them afterwards?

I managed to get a list of all non searchable PDF’s iN Devon Think, but if I try Data->Convert I can’t find a PDF+ button or Make Searchable

What am I doing wrong?

2

What edition of DEVONthink do you use? Conversion to searchable PDF is a feature of only DEVONTHINK Pro Office.

3

That bugs me even more, got the PRO (office)

4

The forum’s not going to be able to help diagnose a problem with specific documents … you’re better off sending a trouble report to support-at-devontechnologies.com or here and including samples of the PDFs that DEVONthink is not recognizing as convertible. That way the tech staff can see the actual issue and deal with it.

5

The question for now is: is it in Office Pro? Should it be in Data->Convert?

6

In DEVONthink Pro Office (only) when a PDF that can be OCRd is selected, then Data > Convert and the contextual menu should show:

7

Having recently upgraded to DTP Office partly for this very facility to convert PDFs to searchable PDFs I am very interested in this. Four questions:

  1. Do I have to go through all of my PDFs and convert them one by one?
  2. If so can I do this from the ‘All PDF Documents’ Group?
  3. How do I know which of the resulting PDFs is the one that has been converted to searchable?
  4. Can I then delete the original, non-searchable PDF and if so will deleting it from the ‘All PDF Documents’ Group delete it from its Group?

Thanks for your patients & help.
Andrew

8

“…patients” ??? Sorry meant patience!!! :open_mouth:

9

If a PDF has been OCR’d previously, it will show up as “PDT+Text” and no further action is needed. (In fact, converting/OCRing an already-OCRd PDF makes things worse, not better)

Yes, or you can select a group of PDFs and have them all converted in a batch (one-by-one, not simultaneously) I keep a Smart Group defined as follows in my databases so I know at a glance what’s not been converted:

In the Kind column of document displays it says “PDF+Text”. So does Tools > Show Info

Sure. You can delete the original automatically if you go to DEVONthink > Preferences > OCR and select “Original Document: Move to Trash”

See DEVONthink Help for further instructions on the preference settings…

10

Thanks Korm as usual. :smiley: