I have DEVONthink set to OCR any PDF documents that I add, and I use that feature on a frequent basis. Today I tried to save a signed PDF document (signed with Adobe Sign) into my database. The software immediately OCR’d it and stripped off the signatures.
Is there a way to import it without having it remove the signatures? I’d like to still OCR it, but I can’t have unsigned copies stored.
Are you sure that the signed PDFs are not OCRed already (or rather that they do not already a text layer)? Than OCRing them again is not necessary.
I don’t use Adobe Sign. Can it save a flattened PDF, I.e., one with the annotations baked in?
That seemed to work. I needed to run Preflight in Acrobat, flatten the PDF so the signature was part of the saved “image” of the file. Then I could import it and DEVONthink would not strip out the signature. It could also OCR the resulting file.
Although this fix worked, it would be nice to have DEVONthink respect the signature(s) so they could be authenticated in the future. Flattening the file removes the ability to authenticate the signature.
As is to be expected: the signature is there to protect the integrity of the data. Any change to the file will invalidate the signature.
You can’t have it both ways: change the file (which potentially includes adding a text layer) and keep a signature that validates.
I’m not sure why you say that would be the case.