I scanned a book chapter, imported it to DT4, and then used DT4’s OCR engine. I can annotate (highlight, underline, etc.) just fine in DT4. However, when I open the document in PDF Expert, the latter does not seem to recognize the OCR layer. Does anyone know what’s going on?
the latter does not seem to recognize the OCR layer.
How are you determining this?
Depending on the answer to that: Did you ask Readdle about it? I’m not sure why it’s posed as a question for us. We are doing nothing non-standard with OCR and haven’t varied from it for years now.
Thanks for your response!
I click the “Open in PDF Expert” button in the toolbar of the window in which the PDF is open in DT4. When the doc opens in PDF Expert, I cannot select text and I get the standard, “This appears to be a scan. Would you like to OCR it?” (or however exactly they phrase it).
Not yet.
I wanted to see if anyone had any insights. I do not know whether I am being hare-brained and missing something obvious. The other feature of the situation is that in PDF Expert, it shows text as highlighted (when I’ve annotated with highlight in DT4), even though I can’t select the text. It’s almost as if DT4 is flattening the doc before sending it to PDF Expert. So I wanted to find out if there’s a quick fix from the DT4 side of things.
You’re welcome!
I just did OCR on a document and used Open With > PDF Expert. It opened as expected, with selectable text intact.
How did you do OCR in DEVONthink?
I used the command Data > OCR > OCR to searchable PDF.
Are there any errors reported in Window > Log?
Yes, there is!
4/29/26, 3:01:58 PM: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin Deinstalling this incompatible extension is highly recommended.
The recommendation only appears on one of my computers, probably because I haven’t used Adobe on the other one, at least not in a long time.
I should add that the problem occurs also on the computer that doesn’t have that plugin.
Yeah, that’s unrelated to the issue.
In DEVONthink, hold the Option key and select Help > Report Bug and we can talk off to the side.
Did you opened the OCRed file and not the original one?
I’m pretty sure. When I have the OCR’d open in its own window in DT4, I click the toolbar button for “Open in PDF Expert.” As I mentioned above, the file that opens does not seem to have an OCR layer, but the annotations I’ve already made (incl highlighted text) are displayed.
Weird. I use PDF Expert for all, even inside DT (opening it externally), disconnecting Preview and all of it bugs.
However, the difference here is I OCR with PDF Expert or externally with Abbyy 15/16 under Windows.
I OCR’d the particular document in question within DT4. I haven’t been thrilled with the results from PDF Expert’s OCR’ing. I’ve generally used Nitro PDF Pro Essentials for OCR’ing. I wanted to use DT4 to use the ABBYY engine.
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In the OCR settings, do you have Original Document: Move to Trash enabled?
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I don’t. Could that be the issue?
Yes – possible that you inadvertedly opened the original PDF.
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Ah, so how I can find the original PDF and delete it, keeping the OCR’d copy?
Set the preference to “Delete original after OCR” for future OCR processes. For those files you’ve already run through it, compare the creation or added to DT dates.
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That did it! I hadn’t even noticed that there were multiple copies there. THANKS SO MUCH.
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Glad to give some direction.
Simple problems, simple solutions 
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