Newbie; DT3; Duplex scan to multipage PDF, Epson ES 300W, can't merge

What is a good workflow for scanning 2-page and multipage documents to multipage OCR’s PDFs using an Epson ES300W scanner? The DT Help file indicates that I should be able to merge documents, but I can’t select a document in the pop-up dialog drop-down, which must be done before the action can be executed.

The ES 300W is on loan. What is the best scanner to work with mostly 1-5 page letter-size documents? (Asked previously, and more generally, here.)

I can’t select a document in the pop-up dialog drop-down, which must be done before the action can be executed.

?
A screen capture may be helpful.

Thanks.

That is correct. You can’t sort loose documents.

When you’re talking about multi-page documents in DEVONthink’s Import > Image Capture - outside of using the Queue - you’ll be thinking about binders.


You can’t sort and merge with one Binder. It requires two binders.


Here the odd pages start from Letters and the even pages from New Binder.

Note: There appears to be a filenaming bug in the results. i am alerting Development to this.

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Aha! Thank you :blush: .

Still looking for a “best practice” workflow from:

  • Start with multipage duplex-printed paper document
    to:
  • single paginated PDF.

The scanner I am using is portable and thus does not have a glass panel and thus offers no preview “overview” scan.

Have you tried just scanning to the Imports section?

Also, what kind of scanner is this?
And surely it came with its own software.

That’s what I’ve been doing. The best workflow I’ve found so far is to scan to Imports, move single-page scans into a Binder, correct the sort order, and save to the destination DevonThink container.

Portable duplex scanner. I installed the most recent software, which is Epson Smart Scan 3.0.0, but have not used it. I had thought it best to use DevonThink to pull scans in and “fix” them. Are you suggesting that it’s better to use the scanner’s software and then push them (if the scanner can) into DevonThink? There may not be a general rule for which is better. I assume the scanner mfrs know scanning better than DevonThink, but I would also assume DevonThink knows PDFs better than the scanner mfrs. I’ll look into Epson’s software.

Thanks for your help. I may be moving slowly, but I wouldn’t be progressing at all without it :blush: .

You’re welcome. :slight_smile:
Scanning with the scanner’s software is a personal choice, but if there’s no preview available in DEVONthink, I’d think it may be more useful to use their software.

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Newbie here as well. I am using DT3.03 and have a Epson ES-300W WiFI Scanner. I see some of the posts in this thread showing the ES-300W working when in Wired USB mode but that is not what I got the scanner for; I want to use it as a wireless scanner.

If I cannot install a DT3 plug in to scan directly from my Epson ES-300W, I would be willing to work outside of DT3 and just push the scanned documents to my DT3 Inbbox, but I see no option in my Epson Sftware - is there a plugin I need to install for this to work?

No there is no plugin for the EPSON software (and technically there is no “plugin” for the other software either).

It is also unclear if you have tried using the scanner with DEVONthink 3.

Sorry – Yes I have tried to use the Scanner.

I can connect to my Mac via the Epson Software & of course, scan a document to a PDF.

I cannot do this in DevonthinkPro 3 – All I can see in DevonThink is the scanner integrated with my Epson Printer, but I cannot see my Epson ES-300W Scanner

Can you access the ES-300W in Apple’s Image Capture application?
This is generally a good test of whether a specific (non-ScanSnap) scanner should work with DEVONthink.

I don’t know this specific model but I am using an Epson printer too.

Mine offers three options when scanning directly from the printer/scanner to the Mac: Scan to PDF, Scan to JPEG, and Scan to E-Mail. It is important to know that these are just names for scanning actions that although can not be renamed very well can be customized.

I set Scan to PDF to save the scan as a PDF to my Mac’s Downloads folder. I set Scan to JPEG to save the scan as TIFF (I would have preferred PNG but that’s not an option) to my Mac’s Downloads folder. And since I almost never need to scan directly to Mail I set Scan to E-Mail to save the scan as a PDF in DEVONthink.

The Epson Scan Utility allows to either just pick a destination folder, which in this case would be DEVONthink’s Global Inbox, or a destination application. While the first option pushes the scan into the Global Inbox with no further action required by the user the latter triggers the Sorter to chose the destination inside of DEVONthink’s databases.

Which option is the better depends on the user—for occasional scans probably it is preferable to directly put the scan in the place it is supposed to be in via the Sorter. When there are lots of scans done maybe pushing them into the Global Inbox and sorting them later is better (or even let smart rules do the sorting).

At least for me this is a quite comfortable way to scan into DEVONthink.

I want to merge my scanned odd pages and even pages into one PDF. So, I scan the, say first 5 pages of odd side into Odd pages binder. Then, I scan the behind 5 even pages into Even pages binder.

The problem I have is, it leaves the Imports section immediately and move to the Destination Global Inbox. Somehow, I cannot don’t choose the Destination. As such, I cannot the Sort and Merge Documents.

Did I miss out something?

Screenshot 2022-10-24 at 8.16.12 AM

To merge odd and even pages scanned pages, scan all the odd then all the even into one binder

Screen Capture 24 Oct 2022 at 09.33.55

Then select the Binder in the Imports sub folder, and press the sort button Screen Capture 24 Oct 2022 at 09.33.26 at the bottom of the view, and from the menu select “Shuffle odd/even pages”.

Select the starting page number for even and odd pages and press start. Once completed you can save the either in this view or back in the scanner view.

The problem I have is, it leaves the Imports section immediately and move to the Destination Global Inbox. I don’t have a chance to select the Binder.

Found the answer to my problem. As long as I don’t click Save, it remains in the Imports section. I thought I need to click Save to have the scan turn into PDF. My bad.
Screenshot 2022-10-25 at 6.41.25 AM

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I am attempting to make shuffle work and can’t get it to order the even pages properly. I

  1. Scan odd pages
  2. Flip the stack over and scan the even pages. Note that this has the last page on top
  3. Select “Shuffle odd/even pages”
  4. The page order (for a 4-page stack) is 1,8,3,6,5,4,7,2
  5. I would have expected the order 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, so I have to manually reorder the even pages

Is this expected behavior from the Shuffle function?

The odd/even shuffle would expect the page order before sorting to be 1,3,5,7,2,4,6,8. If you need to reverse the order of the even pages, scan the odd and even pages into different binders the use the the sort and merge option and select reverse for the even pages.

  1. Flip the stack over and scan the even pages. Note that this has the last page on top

This is the beginning of the problem.
While it’s natural to scan then flip a page face-down to build the stack for scanning the obverse side, you’re then scanning, 8, 6, 4, 2.

In this case, you could have used the old magician’s trick and dealt from the bottom of the deck, yielding 2, 4, 6, 8 in the scan order. Less intuitive to begin with, but it would have provided the correct shuffle, as noted by @aedwards.

Just curious… have you considered getting a duplexing scanner to avoid this process?