I have been using Acrobat Professional to scan and OCR documents. DEVONThink recognizes most words when I do a search. I have returned to some documents and have added information using the typewriter in Adobe.
When I search the document in Adobe, the words I added are found. When I search using DEVONThink, it does not recognize the new words that I have added. What am I not doing correctly?
If I understand your query, you have selected a PDF in your database, opened it under Acrobat, then edited and saved it. But when you look at the PDF from within DT Pro, you don’t see the changes.
Solution: In your database, select the PDF and choose File > Synchronize. You should now see the edit changes. (I’m assuming that your edit under Acrobat involved a modification of the text in both the image layer and the text layer.)
Note, however, that if you added a text annotation – note or comment – to the PDF under Acrobat, that information is not going to be seen by a Search in DEVONthink. Nor would it be seen by Acrobat’s search across an index of PDF files (rather than by a Command-F find), as such notes are not part of the text layer of the PDF. So if this is your question, you haven’t done anything wrong; you’ve just hit upon a characteristic of Adobe’s PDF file format.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the response. My understanding of Adove Acrobat is not deep enough to know if I’ve modified both layers. I used the typewriter tool to put a text label in the top corner of my PDF. Not sure if this is what you term a text annotation.
I did an experiment putting 6 PDF’s in a folder including my modified PDF. Then I did a search in Acrobat, not a command -F find. The search did find the modification I’d made. Is this what you mean by a search across an index of PDF files? If so Adobe was successful in identifying the words I had added. If not, could you tell me what type of search did you mean in Adobe that such changes would not be seen? Thanks for the help. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Text typed onto a PDF using Acrobat’s Typewriter mode will not be indexed nor found in DEVONthink. Likewise, it won’t be found in Preview. DEVONthink uses Apple’s PDFKit (the core of Preview) to handle PDFs.
Several years ago I had a project that involved more than six hundred standard operating procedure PDF documents for a government agency. Acrobat Pro 5 created a searchable index of the text of that group, so that the entire document collection could be quickly searched for a query term. However, notes added to PDFs were not indexed and were not found by searches. I haven’t checked that procedure in Acrobat Pro 7 or 8 – I was using Acrobat Pro 5 at the time.
Hi Bill,
Thanks again for your help. Despite not finding added notes, DT does a great job on word searches.