Scan stacks with QCard separator sheets
Interleave printed QCards in a paper stack and scan the whole pile at once — the rules that decide where documents split, the two scanning routes, and what the errors mean when a stack comes out wrong.
Before you begin
- QCards generated for the documents in the stack
At the end of this guide you can hand the scanner a pile — QCard, pages, QCard, pages — and get back correctly separated, correctly indexed documents, because you know the three rules the splitter lives by.
The idea: generate QCards for the documents in the stack, lay each one on top of its pages, and scan everything as one batch. Content Central finds the barcode sheets and splits the batch at each one; every document takes its instructions — catalog, type, field values, destination — from the QCard above it.
The three rules
The stack must begin with a QCard. Pages before the first card have no instructions to follow — the whole file is set aside with a Missing QCard notice ("the file did not begin with a QCard").
Everything after a QCard belongs to it, until the next QCard. There's no page counting unless you asked for it — the next barcode sheet is the boundary. (A QCard generated with Use fixed page count splits every N pages instead, for stacks of uniform documents with one card up front.)
Two QCards back-to-back is an error, not an empty document. A card with no pages under it usually means two documents' cards got shuffled together — the batch is set aside rather than guessed at.
An end-of-document QCard (the Include end-of-document QCard option at generation time) adds a fourth, optional rule: it closes the current document explicitly, so trailing junk pages — the fax cover, the blank backside — can be kept out without a fresh card.
Two ways to scan the stack
- A scanner that saves to a folder — the folder is watched by a folder capture job whose administrator set its Document Descriptor to QCard ("Image files… will be converted into documents. QCards determine the document boundaries."). Scan, walk away.
- DirectScan — scan the stack from the DirectScan capture page. There's no QCard setting to enable there; interleaved QCards are recognized and honored automatically, on top of whatever you chose on the page itself.
When a stack comes out wrong
| Symptom | What happened |
|---|---|
| Nothing arrived, and an Unprocessed File Notification went out | Rule 1 or 3 was broken — the batch was set aside intact for an administrator, in the system's Unprocessable folder |
| Two documents came out as one | The QCard between them was missed — usually a skewed, faint, or partially covered barcode; reprint and rescan that portion |
| A document has the wrong values | The wrong card was on top of it — the fix is a re-shuffle and rescan, or field edits after filing |
Don't photocopy QCards. The barcode is a pointer to that card's stored instructions — a copy of last month's card files this month's paper with last month's values. Cards are cheap; generate fresh ones.
Success check: build a small test stack — two QCards, a few pages each — and scan it. Two documents should arrive, each with its card's catalog, type, and values, and neither containing the other's pages.