Beyond messaging and email, PDF is one of the most common formats for communicating information between people. In applications that support printing to PDF — and there are many — you can print a paginated PDF directly to DEVONthink. (more)

PDFs come from a variety of sources but not always in the perfect form for your work. Sometimes you may have pages you don’t need. Maybe you had a marathon scanning session to one big document but need individual documents now. Whatever reason you have for splitting a PDF, DEVONthink has a few special options available. (more)

In DEVONthink and DEVONthink To Go you can copy page links in a PDF. These item links allow you to jump to a specific page in the PDF. But sometimes the number in the item link is wrong… isn’t it? Or you may manually add a page parameter but it isn’t jumping to the correct page!? Here’s how PDF pages and the item link parameter work. (more)

There are times when you may need to split a PDF in DEVONthink into smaller documents. Here are a few ways to do it. (more)

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)

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)

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)

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)