Thanks, Bluefrog - I had questions after reading those help topics because the closest thing to describing a binder is " Create empty binders here to which you add your scanned pages. Alternatively, use the Create new Binder button at the bottom of the sidebar."
I hope nobody takes these comments as criticism. Devonthink is an amazing utility. It is my financial file cabinet, my note-taker as I learn a new language or read non-fiction - it’s a swiss army knife. I even use DT as a replacement for Scrivener. Why use different tools for jobs when I can remain in an environment that feels like home?
Here were some breakthroughs regarding the import facility that seem obvious in hindsight:
- A binder is a multipage scan in progress. You add to it by naming it as the destination for scanning. You can’t drag and drop files into it.
- If you choose multiple regions on a page by clicking “use custom size” it will scan each region as a separate page in one pass of the scanner. Nice.
- In a binder, you can reorder the pages with drag and drop.
- On the bottom of the binder pane, once you have a binder open, there is a menu that lets you reverse the order of pages, shuffle pages that are ordered as all front sides followed by all back sides, or sort and merge documents. “Documents” here means “binders” - use this to grab the contents of a second binder and move them in.
- You can edit a page in a binder, which will let you rotate it. If you double click on a page you’ve opened up for editing, you get to do more things like edit the contrast. The “done” button appears to work the same as “save”.
- When you save an individual page in a binder (right click and “save”) or right click on a binder icon (looks like a book) and hit save, the binder disappears. This isn’t a problem, because it gets saved into the the destination you originally chose.
When a binder is saved, it becomes a multipage pdf file and disappears from the importer. If you had the OCR option checked at the time it was saved, it gets a text component that is the OCR’d document.
I hope these comments help someone else who saves scans in DT but hasn’t been using the importer. It will save time and increase the accuracy of your filing, because you can set tags, filename, and destination group at the time you scan the document.
Using the import function is easy, but in my opinion it’s underdocumented. For instance, the excellent Taking Control of Devonthink book (free!) is a great work, but the word “binder” is not in its 250 pages.