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Use an Unsupported Scanner

May 19, 2009 — Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann

DEVONthink Pro Office comes with built-in support for both Image-Capture-compliant scanners as well as ones that use a TWAIN driver to communicate with your Mac. Some scanners however refuse to work with both approaches and work best with their own scan software. Don’t worry, you can make even make most of these scanners work with DEVONthink.

DEVONthink Pro Office recognizes scan applications by their internal signature. When these scan applications send a scan to DEVONthink (means: they tell DEVONthink to open the file), DEVONthink knows that the files are coming from a scan application and so it treats them differently: it imports the files, runs OCR on them, and shows the meta data entry dialog if told so in its Preferences.

To integrate your scan software, find out if it can open the scan with a third-party application when the scan is finished. If it can, choose DEVONthink Pro Office as the target application. That’s it.

If DEVONthink Pro Office does not run OCR on the incoming scan, it may not recognize that scan application yet. In this case please create a .zip file of your scan application and email it to our support department. We will then add its signature to one of the next releases.