scanning in DT v2

So far DT v2 is working great!

But one question: If you scan something, and DT closes before you finish OCR (or if you close DT prior to finishing OCR), does DT store the temporary (scanned) file somewhere prior to running OCR?

(If DT doesn’t save the scanned file prior to doing OCR, perhaps it might be worth including a dialogue that warns that data will be lost if you attempt to close DT prior to OCR being finished–of course, this wouldn’t normally be an issue)

Background: DT 2 is working great–it has scanned and OCR’d everything fine so far with my Fujitsu scansnap. But today when I was scanning in a book using the scansnap, the processes became unresponsive. (Note to self: break up large scanning jobs into smaller ones, and then join the resulting pdf’s together…) Anyway, because the OCR progress window didn’t indicate any progress (after about 8 hours) I decided to DT (didn’t have to force quit). (And I have no idea if it was related, but the reason I decided to quit DT was that I was unable to launch applications: like safari, or skim, and wanted to restart my mackbook (I’m not sure DT was the issue or not–that’s never happened before).

thanks!

If there is an OCR process running and you quit DT2, a panel should ask you to confirm this. If this doesn’t happen, please send a bug report with exactly the sequence of how you closed the application to support@devon-technologies.com.

thanks; I submitted a report

With my setup, Scansnap always saves an initial copy to a user supplied folder (check Scansnap’s settings, in the “save” tab). If DT isn’t awake at the moment of scanning, I can always go to the scansnap folder and manually move/rename the pdf file into DT.

pvonk is correct.

To amplify that a bit more: I’ve got DTPO2 Preferences > OCR checked to delete the original PDF after it has been OCRd and imported into a database.

I’ve got ScanSnap Manager set to save the PDF resulting from a scan into my Pictures folder.

Bottom line: If I were to Quit DT Pro Office during a scan and prior to the OCR step, ScanSnap Manager would have, in any case, saved the PDF resulting from the scan into my Pictures folder. So when I see PDFs from scans residing there, I know they have not been OCRd and captured into my database. I can then take action by choosing (in DTPO) File > Import > Images (with OCR) and selecting those PDFs. I’ve been very pleased by the reliability with which ScanSnap Manager and DTPO work together.

As Annard noted, the situation could only get uncertain were one to Quit DTPO while it is in process of performing OCR on a PDF. If you were to do that, you should receive a message asking if you really want to do that. If you don’t receive such a message, Annard recommends submission of a bug report. (But I’ll wager that the message would appear if one issues the Quit command during OCR processing.)

I’d forgotten to add that even if you set this preference, the original will be moved to the Trash. Thus you can recover it using the Finder if necessary.

thanks for all the great help about scanning–I learned a lot about DT in the process.

Recall I initially wrote about a problem where DT became unresponsive while performing OCR on a file. It wasn’t very large though: the saved pdf was only about 12 meg.

As several helpful people have suggested, the files were hanging out in my ~/pictures/ folder, and I just now imported them and performed OCR–worked like a charm, and I didn’t have to re-scan.

I have the OCR function in DT - if I were to purchase the ScanSnap, do I need the OCR in the scanner, too, or is that unnecessary duplication? It’s probably cheaper without the software!

Just about every scanner I’m aware of comes with OCR – but no, you wouldn’t need the scanner to come with OCR software. To clarify, you can OCR any image in DEVONthink – not just PDFs but JPG, GIF, etc.