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(Archived) Any way to disable OCR for specific notes?


kinkersnick

Idea

I have put a number of scanned notebook pages into my Evernote, and they're causing all kinds of havoc when I'm doing searches because of the OCR.

 

Evernote is extremely inaccurate at recognising my handwriting, so when I search for almost anything I end up with about 10 notebook pages that have nothing to do with the search.

 

So my question is: is there any way to disable OCR for specific notes?

 

(Is there some way to make this a feature request?)

 

Thanks

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I don't believe this is currently possible.

 

Evernote staff read every thread so they will see this.

 

You could zip your notebook pages and then I don't think Evernote will OCR them - of course the downside is that you will need to unzip to view.

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I can't blame Evernote for misreading my handwriting. I can't read it either.

 

I have several scanned maps in PDF format stored in Evernote.

The hundreds of towns and city names cause a similar problem with search.

 

To avoid them, I tagged those notes with "x". 

When I don't want them to show up, I add the following term to my search:

-tag:x

 

Not really an OCR issue, but some photos turn up odd words as well.

Here is a remarkable photo of a Japanese house "slightly" pushed off its foundation by the tsunami.

Evernote sees the word bacon (yellow highlight) right in front of the house.

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/cbb6750b-d8c2-41e7-8ff7-14a256ef142c/4c73046e7c46075fff759a9cbed6b8be

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Similar illegibility problems here - I use handwritten notes differently from text or clipped content anyway.  I add keywords in tags or to the text,  and descriptive titles so I can find the right notes quickly.  After that it's much faster and more accurate for me to speed read through the pages to find the section I need.  I try to print some keywords in caps when I'm writing too,  in the hope they at least will get read correctly.

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Do you see any improvement in the Search Results when you search by +text:<your search term>. E.g. In your previous example if you searched for +text:bacon as opposed to just bacon, do you still see the erroneous results?

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Thanks for all your responses.

 

Metrodon: yes, unfortunately zipping them would kinda defeat the point of having them in there.

 

jbenson2: That certainly works, but since these pages are showing up in every search I do, that would mean that I have to write that every single term I search for anything, which is not very user-friendly

 

gazumped and GrumpyMonkey: the issue is happening with notebook pages from the last ten years, long before I was using Evernote. Things that were written with no consideration of OCR. Thank you for the best practice ideas going forward though.

 

Zeesha: that doesn't make any difference I'm afraid.

 

Unfortunately, none of this really solves the problem. What I need is an 'Exclude from OCR' checkbox or something similar on a note-by-note, or notebook-by-notebook basis.

 

Thanks

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Thanks for all your responses.

Metrodon: yes, unfortunately zipping them would kinda defeat the point of having them in there.

jbenson2: That certainly works, but since these pages are showing up in every search I do, that would mean that I have to write that every single term I search for anything, which is not very user-friendly

gazumped and GrumpyMonkey: the issue is happening with notebook pages from the last ten years, long before I was using Evernote. Things that were written with no consideration of OCR. Thank you for the best practice ideas going forward though.

Zeesha: that doesn't make any difference I'm afraid.

Unfortunately, none of this really solves the problem. What I need is an 'Exclude from OCR' checkbox or something similar on a note-by-note, or notebook-by-notebook basis.

Thanks

The idea of the tag (let's call it "exclude")is to put it on notes and use -tag:exclude for every search (you might want to save the search). The notes will not appear.

There are other options. You could put the notes into a local notebook (local stuff is not sent to the server and does not get OCR'd). You could put the notes into PDF form. Handwritten PDFs are not OCR'd (I think).

There is nothing wrong with the suggestion, of course. It would be nice to have that kind of granular control over our accounts. but it is unlikely to come anytime soon, if it comes at all.

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Thanks for all your responses.

 

jbenson2: That certainly works, but since these pages are showing up in every search I do, that would mean that I have to write that every single term I search for anything, which is not very user-friendly

 

The reason this suggestion works so nicely for me is because I am an aggressive user of tags.

I can find almost anything I want by using a search that includes a notebook name and a tag name or two.

And all my notes are sorted by Created Date to make the search results even more efficient.

 

I seldom search using only a single generic word.

But if I do, then I will make sure to tag the result correctly, or add a keyword, to make future searches easier.

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Ah! Thanks GrumpMonkey, putting them as PDFs inline has changed everything!

 

And thanks for the tips jbenson2, I've still got some way to go towards organising my Evernote. I started it off quite a while ago without any kind of order or method, and only now backtracking to try and bring everything into some semblance of sense.

 

Thanks!

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Ah! Thanks GrumpMonkey, putting them as PDFs inline has changed everything!

 

And thanks for the tips jbenson2, I've still got some way to go towards organising my Evernote. I started it off quite a while ago without any kind of order or method, and only now backtracking to try and bring everything into some semblance of sense.

 

Thanks!

Glad I could help! If you are putting everything in order, I have some suggestions for that as well. Specifically, I highly recommend using YYMMDD in the note titles.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

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