Having just acquired a Scansnap S1300i, as seems to be usual with me with anything new, I seem to be having trouble with the finer points of setting it up! in this case it is getting it to send scanned documents to where I want them to be! It is not the machine’s or the software’s fault, it is me, I can’t help it if my brain is not wired up to do these seemingly simple things, but there you are that’s the way it is. All I want to do is to scan a document and send it to a specific folder in DEVONthink Pro Office, (Fig. 1)
Fig.1 DTPO Destination Folder for Scansnap Documents.
Unfortunately the scans either end up in the open database Inbox or a window opens for me to enter details and then it goes to my pictures folder.
I would be very grateful if anybody can help this old duffer out and tell me how these settings should be to achieve my stated goal. (By the way I have not installed the ABBYY software as I prefer to trust the DEVONthink OCR capability, I don’t suppose this makes any difference but thought I would mention it for completeness.)
I’m afraid you will have to adjust your expectations.
Your setting in ScanSnap Manager to save scanner output to your Pictures folder is correct.
When DEVONthink Pro Office grabs the scanner output file for OCR and storage, the storage destination will be determined by your setting in DEVONthink Pro Office Preferences > Import - Destination, the Global Inbox, the Inbox of the frontmost database or Select group (which results in the HUD prompting you to choose a destination).
Perhaps the simplest approach would be to set your database view window to the database that contains the folder to which you wish to send your new searchable PDFS, with Preferences > Import - Destination set to the Inbox of that frontmost database. The searchable PDFs will arrive in the Inbox of that database.
All you need to do then is move the new PDFs from the Inbox to the desired group. If multiple PDFs have accumulated during a scanning session, you can select all of them and move them in a batch.
Remember to set DEVONthink Pro Office Preferences > OCR to move the original scanner output files to the Trash after text recognition. They will be removed from your Pictures folder as they are OCRed.
Thanks Bill, that will do for me I had not realized that the originals would be removed from the Pictures folder, in fact the Inbox of the required database makes more sense than a separate group, al it has made me do is to sort out the Inbox of all the stuff that should be in other groups anyway! Cheers.
Is it not easier to simply disable the OCR function in Devonthink, enable it in the Scansnap settings, and then scan away? As long as the Scansnap is set up to send files directly to Devonthink, your OCR’d PDFs will appear in your destination folder.
I had not realized that the originals would be removed from the Pictures folder, in fact the Inbox of the required database makes more sense than a separate group, al it has made me do is to sort out the Inbox of all the stuff that should be in other groups anyway! Cheers.