Weird behavior with split document command on pdfs

DEVONthink Tips
1

Am in the process of converting a 150 mg pdf of a history book, roughly 260 pages. After OCRing and importing to DTPO, I started splitting into chapters and sections to improve search responses. Here’s the weird behavior. On four occasions, after splitting the document and renaming that split document, the original PDF (actually what remained after the split) disappeared. It was not in the inbox, not in the trash, and a search on its title, i.e., A 65-Year History, returned nothing. Each time I had to re-import the entire original document, resplit up to the last point and continue. This behavior did not occur all of the time and I don’t think it was user error since even I wouldn’t make the same error 4 times and not the rest of the times.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

2

JRPars: I don’t envy you!

Since Bill DeVille nicely provided instructions on how to split PDFs, I’ve been doing a lot of that and haven’t experienced your problem. However, I haven’t had a PDF as large as yours and I haven’t split off so many pages at a time.

Here’s a suggestion: Next time you import it, duplicate it within DTPO, then each time you split a bunch of pages off, duplicate what remains before you do anything else. At least if you lose the original, you’ll be close to it with your most recent copy.

3

Has been anything logged to the system console? You could also try to locate the missing part by creating a smart group for PDF documents and sorting it by modification date.