Questions About Preferences/Scanning

DEVONthink Tips
1

OK, so I’m in the process of scanning in a ton of paperwork from my office, and transferring various files. Learning as I’m going, but I’m definitely a newbie.

I got tired of seeing that box pop up that I have to click Save , on every scan. So eventually I realized I could uncheck the box that says “Enter metadata after text recognition”. Voila, no more box! My question is what does the elimination of that box do to me in my database? Have I eliminated something important to the search process? So the process right now is that I scan my document using ScanSnap. It goes through Devons OCR process, converted to pdf, and is deposited in my database inbox. The original is deleted from “documents”. In my inbox I usually change the title of the file, and tag it, then move it to a group.

My second question is, I’ve noticed that if I reverse things, i.e., uncheck Devon’s box in preferences that says “convert to searchable PDF”, and check ScanSnap’s box in settings>OCR that says “Convert to Searchable PDF” my process is much quicker. EXCEPT that for some reason the original document does not delete from my document folder.

Is there an advantage to having the OCR done in Devon versus ScanSnap? Do I lose something if I use ScanSnap versus Devon? And if ScanSnap is used, how do I get rid of the original documents other than deleting each one manually?

Thanks for all your help.

2

  1. I uncheck the option to add metadata, too. Personally, I have no use for those metadata fields, as they don’t apply to all the document filetypes in my databases, and as I don’t want my scanning workflow to be constantly interrupted by the pop-up that stops everything waiting for me to respond.

  2. If you check OCR in ScanSnap Manager, OCR will be performed by another application than the OCR module in DEVONthink Pro Office. I don’t check that option, so OCR of my scans is performed by DEVONthink Pro Office, and my setting in Preferences > OCR to delete the original scanner file (by default, saved to my Pictures folder) after text recognition works.

3

Thanks Bill. I appreciate you answer.

4

I too have noticed that DTPO no longer can configure ScanSnap Manager. It tries, but the changes seem to be reverted immediately after restarting SSM.

I’ve submitted a support ticket for it.

5

Choose Settings in ScanSnap Manager. Click on the Application tab. Make certain that “Use Quick Menu” is NOT checked.

If it’s necessary to add DEVONthink Pro Office to the list of available applications, click on the Add or Remove button. Let’s add an application, by browsing to and selecting DEVONthink Pro Office in the Applications folder. ScanSnap Manager will display it as DEVONthink Pro.app.

6

Yep, did that. The problem is that DTPO used to configure SSM so that there was a profile automatically created, and used to add the application and everything.

Looking at the plist now, it looks like it adds the Application entry, but doesn’t add a dict to the Scanning Settings array to add the profile.