Special needs ...

Hi all!

I would like to optimize my personal scenario for my private document management and so I hope to find advice and help here to implement this optimization.

At the moment I am digitizing any piece of paper that enters my house. Bills, insurance policies, account statements, official letters, etc. Every such piece of paper gets a unique number, that I call doc-id. I use a special numbering stamp for this. After the number is stamped on the first page of the document, the document is scanned, ocr’ed and imported into DTPO. Here I manually rename the document to the stamped dok-id and move it to the correct place in my document structure. The original paper is put into a folder, sorted by the dok-id and can be retrieved there if really needed.

What happens and makes a lot of work is that the stamp is forgotten or not ocr’ed correctly (ctrl-cmd-i fails, yes I’m using a Mac) and thus changing the document name to the doc-id manually is necessary.

To eliminate these shortcomings I have the following ideas: Optimum would be a workflow in which the document is scanned naked, ocr’ed, given a (6- or 8-digit) dok-id by DTPO as the name of the digital document, the dok-id is printed on a label via a small label-printer, I put the label on the paper document and then into in the physical folder. The digital document is then sorted into its place manually in DTPO.

Any ideas to implement/script this or what hardware for printing is recommended?

Thanks for your input in advance!

-Tom

A future version of DEVONthink will be able to both automatically assign a number to documents and to stamp this number onto PDF documents. Therefore the workflow would look like this:

  1. Send scan to DEVONthink
  2. OCR document
  3. Assign number
  4. Stamp number onto PDF document

Right now this is only possible using AppleScript and external apps, see e.g. Script to open pdf in PDFpen and add an impromptu to the pdf