#Scrivener and devonthink pro for mac#

I tested it out on a clip (below), and in seconds had a searchable Word document that beautifully preserved the formatting of the original.Īnd this is the searchable Word document:

#Scrivener and devonthink pro for mac#

The highest-rated programme for Mac is ABBYY FineReader Pro, available on trial for 30 days. One possibility would be to invest in a software programme dedicated to making documents OCR searchable. In the process, I discovered that anything to do with OCR opened a bottomless pit. The clips are a type of image, so they need OCR to be searched, and most PDFs are not searchable as well.Īnd so I began to look at ways to make documents searchable before putting them in Scrivener.

I’ve taken to clipping relevant parts of such documents (shift-control-4 on a Mac) or exporting them whole as PDFs before sending them to Scrivener. Having searchable documents is important for my current WIP because it’s set in the 16th century, and a number of the resources are rare and/or ancient and only available on BooksGoogle or InternetArchive. In other words, I assumed that Scrivener utilized OCR (Optical Character Recognition). I mistakenly assumed that one of Scrivener’s many superpowers was the ability to make all documents searchable. It’s true that I can put everything and anything into Scrivener, but I also need to be able to search within those documents. After all, one oft-stated advantage of using Scrivener is that you have all your documents in one place. I’ve been putting research documents into Scrivener, assuming that they were searchable.