OCR is a technology that examines the pixels in an image and tries to determine what alphabetical characters they are. These characters are then put into a layer of text underneath the original image so the file appears unchanged but is now searchable. You can estimate the accuracy of the OCR by selecting the PDF and looking at the concordance. (more)

Recently, we had a customer expressing a desire to have black-and-white PDFs. Our head developer, Christian, suggested running a Quartz filter on them. When you export out of Apple’s Preview, you have the option of applying a Quartz filter to adjust the output. (more)

DEVONthink Pro Office stores email messages in their original formats. If you want to keep your messages in an easier to handle file format one option is to ‘print’ them to PDF and keep the PDF instead. Converting hundreds or even thousands of messages manually is a painful process, however. But, as long as Apple hasn’t killed Mac automation, there’s a solution for this: … (more)

ePub and Mobi (the Kindle format) are solid file formats for electronic books. But they are harder to handle than, e.g., PDF or plain text as they are designed for reading on an ebook reader. They are not really suited for using them inside other applications or for long-term archiving. (more)

iOS 10 comes with a great but somewhat hidden feature: Print to PDF. It allows you to save any document that you can print as a PDF and send it by email or clip it to DEVONthink To Go.

In the Share sheet from any app choose Print. The print preview dialog appears. Now instead of printing “pinch” on the print preview like just as if you’d want to enlarge it. It opens — now as a PDF — in a separate dialog. Choose Share again and send it anywhere you like. (more)

DEVONthink allows you to get a link to a selected page in a PDF document (Edit > Copy Page Link, hold ⇧Shift to show this open). Power user Chen Guo has created the open-source tool Excerptor that goes even further and  links directly to selected text. (more)

Following up on last week’s post, if you are following along at home, we now have screen captures going directly to DEVONthink as PDF files. However, these PDF files are merely images, ie. not searchable. (more)

Have you ever used those fancy screen capture applications that allow you to annotate on a screen capture? When you take screenshots as PDFs you can easily annotate them in DEVONthink:

Now when you make your screen capture, you will end up with a PDF. Select the PDF in DEVONthink and add notes, arrows, even links. (more)

One of the new features introduced with DEVONagent 3 is the ability to not only search HTML pages and news feeds but also PDF, PostScript, OpenOffice, Oracle Open Office, and Microsoft Word documents. To make DEVONagent search also these other document types, expand the search window, switch to the Settings tab, and select the file types you want to search in the Files area. Then run your search. PDF and other documents show a little file type icon in the Results list. (more)

If you want to import a batch of scanned PDFs without converting them to searchable PDFs right away, e.g. because you want to run the time-consuming OCR process later, you can easily do so. Import the files, e.g. to a group “To OCR”. Later, make sure to check Preferences > OCR > Original Document > Move to Trash, select all the documents, and convert them in one batch using Data > Convert > To Searchable PDF. This replaces the selected scanned PDFs with searchable copies and deletes the original file in one batch.