Okay so I listened to the experts and switched to Bill De Ville’s suggestion to scan documents directly into DTP, and let it perform the OCR. Now that the OCR setting allows one to increase accuracy (versus speed) I’m must say that I am quite happy with the OCR results in DTP. Thanks Bill!
Now I am faced with the task of renaming the hundreds of documents I scanned in from the default scanned title 2009_06_18_22_etc to a more meaningful title. I really like Bill’s tip to use the “Set As Title” contextual menu command as it saves a lot of typing but the process is a little fiddly as I have to go through the documents one by one, select the appropriate text, and keep it selected while bringing up the “Set As Title” contextual menu. I find that I often lose the text selection when trying to pull up the contextual menu.
My question - is there any way to assign “Set As Title” to a hotkey or are there any scripts out there that take a load of default named documents and present each one to you for renaming e.g. Document 1, select the text for the title, hit ok and it sets the Text as Title; then document 2 presents etc.
There must be quite a common need for renaming batches of scanned files easily as this is what most people will have to do when starting a new project or initially moving to DTP.
This can be changed. The script is saved as
Set Title As___Cmd-Ctrl-Alt-T.scpt
ie, the shortcut is determined by the filename (!), so straightforward to change.
I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand what you’re describing above. I can’t find any script called Set Title As___Cmd-Ctrl-Alt-T.scpt and don’t know what to change.
~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Scripts/Rename/Set Title As___Cmd-Ctrl-Alt-T.scpt
Modifications under that Script folder hierarchy may be lost if DEVONthink Pro Scripts under the Script Menu Extra section of the Install Add-Ons dialog is selected; maybe someone knows the details for sure?
I think that’s correct. Since Beta 1 in December, my solution has been to keep all my non-Install Add-Ons scripts in a separate folder called Custom Scripts. That saves the trouble of having to pull my own scripts out of the folders that the installer is going to update with each beta release.
I got sick and tired of digging 3/4 of the way down the contextual menu to get to the Set Title As command. It’s crazymaking to dig like that over, and over, and over. To me, from a usability perspective, that command should really go at the top of the contextual menu.
I think the much better approach was to use the Rename > Selected Text script and move it to an easily accessible position at the top of my Custom Scripts folder, forget about using the key commands, and tie it to a single FastScripts key labeled on the keyboard somehow with a template or label tape.
In my opinion, I think it would help if the developers reorganized the Rename > Selected Text folder structure so that both the script name and the Set Title As contextual menu item name are exactly the same. I used DTPO for many months before I finally figured out (last week, in fact) that the Rename > Selected Text script was the same as Set Title As.
New customers, especially, shouldn’t be put through this sort of confusion.
Don’t forget also Christian’s applescript that you can customize to automatically rename your titles. This has been cited in several other forum posts. I set mine up with successive loops so it also attempts to include information like the type of business form (invoice, packing slip etc.) and its date following the vendor name in the title. Then all I do is correct minor mistakes, usually in the date because that’s so hard to get out of the OCR text correctly.
BTW, this is slightly off-topic, but I think that the DTPO team might consider a separate support forum for those of us facing issues like this as part of large-scale scanning projects involving many banker’s boxes full of paper. But I’ll save further remarks on that for its own post.
Yes! Inconsistent naming for the same functionality accessible in multiple ways/places, some which are hard to discover and/or understand exactly what they do because of missing or sparse documentation, has frustrated me for awhile. And ambiguous or overgeneralized naming, e.g.:
Thanks sjk and acl for the heads up on the applescript to this - it makes things much easier. I also was confused because the naming was different on this script from “Set Title As”. Now that you’ve pointed this out things are a lot easier.
I was also completely unaware, till Bill told me about it, of the “Set Title As” function. I guess with a sophisticated complex piece of software that there are bound to be parts of the software that remain “hidden” from newer users.
But I pretty much agree with redacted and sjk - scanning large amounts of documents and giving them appropriate names, and further classifying them into the right groups etc. is probably one of the key things that DTP users are likely to do. In that respect I think it would make sense to focus on that flow and really make it clear to users, old and new, as to the optimum way to do it. For example the company could demo the flow of scanning say 10 or 20 documents, auto-renaming them or using “Set Title As” renaming and then classifying. That would at least make it clear how some of these things could be achieved.
Personally I think that the naming and classifying actions are so key to maximising the use of DTP that they should be really obvious to use and not relegated to Contextual menus or scripts. I’d like to see some of this functionality on the menu bar itself possibly.
Again I offer these comments up not in criticism but in the spirit of hopefully making suggestions to enable what is already one of my all time favourite Mac applications to be even better and, crucially, more easy to use.
Even in less sophisticated software there’s been an increase of functionality (too often undocumented) that’s only accessible from context menus, apparently violating Apple interface guidelines (which even Apple software is guilty of).
It can be hard choosing which commands deserve higher visibility/accessibility priority in different places in the interface. Since I normally prefer using keyboard shortcuts (if possible) that’s less an issue for me than it would be with more mouse-centric usage.
Maybe you mean the toolbar? Not sure what might belong there for purposes you’re thinking of.
Or we could call it the positively constructive/literary form of criticism.
Yes - I meant to write that it would be useful to access these functions from the toolbar.
I must admit that I tend to use the mouse more often than the keyboard. There’s something about all those little funny symbols and Alt and Option and Ctrl that I find extremely confusing. And Ive used a Mac for years. The exception to this would be Quicksilver where I find I love using the keyboard. I guess it’s all about muscle memory and a little perseverance…
I use a program called Keyboard Maestro to add my own custom keyboard shortcuts to the DTPO menu. I find myself setting the date to the date of the document (billing statement date/due date/ect…) all the time.
Clearly not the ideal situation for everyone, but it makes my using the script menu items much easier.
This is what it looks like in KM.
Activate DEVONthink Pro
Click Mouse At (618,9) From The Main Screen’s Top Left Corner
Click Mouse At (-176,-387) From The Front Window’s Top Left Corner
Select ‘Set date…’ in the menu ‘’ in DEVONthink Pro
This is nice but it assumes that your open databases will always be in the same absolute position. That’s fine if it works for you and others but it would be a mess for me as I’m constantly shuffling windows around the screen. And no, I don’t use Expose. Maybe I should.
It’s just pointing to the menubar’s script icon. I only rename the dates when I’m in DTPO (which I think is the only way you can), and the screen coordinates are for my display and resolution obviously. The coordinates point to the same space in the menu bar regardless of the DB that is open. Since Finder won’t let you drag windows into the menu bar, it can only point to those same physical coordinates.
You could also use fn+F2+Ctrl (Macbook Pro) to navigate Mac menu items ala Windows navigation and arrow over to the script menu and X times down to select the same thing. Since it’s a script, I found the mouse coordinates much quicker for response time.
I don’t see “Set date…” under any DTPO’s script menus; is that some unbundled script you installed?
I think twick’s point was that your navigation method of using Keyboard Maestro is more fragile than somehow assigning shortcuts directly to command names.
I guess. KM lets has a built in recorder that follows you key clicks, mouse navigation, etc. Once it’s setup, I just single click a PDF inside of DTPO, press Cmd-Shift-D and the rename date script runs. Hasn’t failed me yet. For me, it’s much easier than mousing up the script menu, finding the script in the long list of drop down menus. I use KM in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, ect… for grouping actions, menus that don’t have keyboard shortcuts. I just find it easy to fire it up, press record, run though my menu navigation and save. It may be that I don’t have as good of luck with using the keyboard assignment in Leopard’s System Prefs, so this works for me. Just offering another option. KM is cheaper than QuicKeys and works very similar.
Not only for you, as with other alternatives to tediously repetitive mouse traversing of menus.
And it’s not an optimal, long-term solution to assigning/managing a limited number of keyboard shortcuts for an increasing number of apps. The last paragraph of John Gruber’s Losers, Weepers article, now over five years old, is still the best summary of the issue I’ve seen.
Maybe gesture interactions will become an increasingly viable alternative to keyboard shortcuts in more contexts?
Interesting discussion. By coincidence I’ve just installed Fast Scripts - they’ve made the app free for the first 10 actions but I may pay for it anyway as I like RedSweater/Daniel Jakult’s attitude.
But I feel I shouldn’t really be needing to run scripts, access context menus, and cobble automator scripts to access what seems to me to be a key area of functionality for the application. Perhaps that’s just because my particular need is not mainstream. Though I think it’s pretty certain that for most users a significant part of the interaction with DTP is getting the documents in there via OCR and then naming them appropriately. If it is shouldn’t this functionality be right there up front and obvious?
As we’re evaluating the Beta maybe there’s a chance that this could change…
