Drag-and-Drop OCR in iOS 11
October 31, 2017 — Jim Neumann
DEVONthink To Go does not have OCR(Optical Character Recognition)capabilities built-in. However, if you have an iOS device capable of running in split view mode (as of this writing: iPad Pro, iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 4) and an iOS OCR application, you may* be able to do OCR now.
- Open the OCR application (and make sure it’s set to do OCR automatically, if needed).
- Open DEVONthink To Go and flip up from the bottom of the screen to show the iOS dock.
- Hold and drag the OCR app to a side of the screen until it appears in a split view.
- In DEVONthink To Go, navigate to a file you need to do OCR on, click and hold until it separates from the file list.
- Drag and drop it into the OCR application to process it. (Save the file if required.)
- After OCR is complete, drag the OCR’d file back into the database.
Bonus-tip: If you begin dragging a file, pause and, with your other hand, touch other files to OCR. Dropping these files creates a multipage PDF, with each page OCR’d!
This was tested with the free Scanner Mini application from Readdle; it does not (yet?