Working with Jobs

Jobs are a central concept in ELAN Capture. All image processing and content discovery revolves around jobs. Therefore you should understand what jobs are and how they work.

File Browser Mode

When first starting up ELAN Capture, the user interface presents a File Browser in place of the Job Tree. This is an important distinction between the operation modes. It is possible to scan, view, edit and process images without creating a job, but settings can not be applied and advanced operations are not possible. However, quick corrections and ease of use make good use of this mode. You can use two different displays for the File Browser. The default mode for the File Browser is a special, high performance "ELAN file browser"  mode that is capable to display very large number of files at a reasonable speed. To change to standard, Windows mode, go to Jobs -> Preferences. This provides a more familiar user interface, similar to Windows Explorer. This mode It is OK to use with smaller jobs. 

The diagram below demonstrates the same location of file system viewing in File Browse and Job modes:

Definition of a  ELAN Capture Job

A job always reflects the current state of your imaging workflow. A ELAN Capture job is defined by a set of raster images, related hierarchy and list information, metadata index settings and plug-in (barcoding, bates-stamping, etc..) settings.

ELAN Capture uses a few XML files and a binary file to save everything about scanning a certain set of documents:

• image files to be processed
• image hierarchy information
• document index information
• settings for converting your images to a PDF file
• and other important parameters

The chapter on Processing Jobs, gives you a good understanding of the operation of the image processor. For the time being, you only need to understand that there are several parameters, settings, and a list of images that are part of your job.

ELAN Capture will automatically take care of the job handling for you. You must save the current job before you exit. This way you ensure that ELAN Capture will continue the job where you exited.

When handling images within a job, you will assign certain parameters (metadata, barcode, etc...) to the whole job. However, image processing parameters (deskew, despeckle, threshold etc...) can be easily changed and applied to a selection of files, using the Job Tree.

Job Files Overview

Job files have an extension of *.org. A job file only contains the current state of the job, and contains the tree and . When you load a job, you load the JOB file, typically called Capture.org. However, The job files are rarely alone in your job folder. Along with your job files you will also find some binary information for the thumbnails display.

Capture.org: the main job file that is holding the information for the job tree, hierarchy and list item data.

CaptureJobSettings.xml: a human-readable text file that holds the setting parameters for the hetadata fields and thir relationships to hierarchy levels.

CapturePluginData.xml:  a human-readable text file that hold setting parameters for barcoding, renaming, stamping and forms recognition settings.