I’ve heard a lot of good things about your program, and I’m giving it a try.
I’m a sociology student and I’m hoping it can help me write my research papers. The pdf importation
seemed especially useful, and so far it is, but with one hiccup: a lot of academic articles come as non-ocr scanned documents.
I realize this is a big request, and possibly outside the main goal of scrivener, but it would be nice if scrivener could do OCR on pdfs and maybe images in the research section of projects.
I’ll let others respond on the subject of OCR within Scrivener. I have encountered the same problem with pdfs, also being an academic, and when I come across an un-OCRed paper I open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro and use the OCR there, which I find works very well. Your university might well have a site licence for the software, or at least have it installed on a PC somewhere that you could use.
Thanks nicka. I currently run the documents through OCR software before importing them to scrivener, I just figured I’d put it on the wish list since it would make my life easier, and thereby the program more useful, not to have to pre-process them.
Sometimes it is best to use third party solutions because third party solutions can specialize in that given niche of features. The idea behind SCR is a streamlined and lean program that does what it is designed to do very well and very fast. If you start adding a bunch of features like OCR then SCR would become something more akin to WORD or a suite which would lead to longer development times, more costly coding, longer beta times, and a confusing and clunky interface because instead of doing a few features well it would now have to do many features just ok.
Honestly OCR is best trusted to a good OCR program. When gathering data using better quality OCR gives you better quality data and saves time in the long run correcting things like 3’s that are B’s etc which in turn saves you time.
I do not think OCR belongs in SCR and would only make the program more bulky and sluggish. I understand your dilemma but I don’t think having OCR in SCR would be a good solution.
Now you could use Acrobat Pro and a little Scripting and make your OCR conversions more automated and streamlined then just import the final corrected data into SCR once your automation is done.