Problems converting to searchable PDF

DEVONthink Tips
1

I downloaded DevonThink Pro Office (I’ll buy it as soon as I can get around this problem), and I’ve been testing out a workflow that works for me.

Today I have been printing to PDF some articles from online magazines, then converting the PDF+Text files (the text is just the URL from printing the PDF, it seems) into Searchable PDFs. This was working fine, until a few minutes ago. Now the Convert --> To Searchable PDF command doesn’t seem to do anything. It doesn’t convert and there’s no OCR happening in the background.

Is this because my trial version is going to be ending soon? I think just before it stopped working, I had clicked on Backup & Optimize.

Thanks in advance,
Elsa

2

You can only do a limited number of OCR runs per day in trial mode (around 20 off the top of my head). Normally, you should see a warning panel but this may not be working during conversion or scripting. My guess is that if you do “File > Import > Images (with OCR)” you’ll see a panel coming up politely inviting you to purchase our software. (And despite this glitch we hope you will do!)

3

There’s a limit on the number of pages that can be OCRd per day in the demo mode. I suspect that’s what you encountered.

Most PDFs that are downloaded from the Web are already searchable and do not need to be OCRd. That’s also true of most pages “printed” as PDF.

4

Ironically, I was getting ready to buy it when the problem started, but I figured that might be the case.

The PDFs that I’m printing to definitely aren’t searchable - from online versions of print magazines - the number of words for each 4 or 5 page article is listed as 20 or 30, I think because the URL is the only text it sees. Plus, I was doing a search for the main words in each article, and the search wouldn’t come up with the PDF until I converted it.

I’ll be off to purchase it this evening.

Thanks for the quick responses!

Elsa

5

Thank you and thank you again for informing us about it. The next maintenance release will report this limit now to the prospective buyers during conversion or scripting of OCR.