(Archived) PDF / Scanning on Mac

[gu788 0]

I have a lot of receipts and other documents already on my computer in a PDF format, is there an easy way to get theses into evernote? Also, I was thinking about scanning a lot of documents into evernote, so I could search through them (they are handwritten), what is the best way to do this? I have a scanner with a document feeder, so I just need to know what format, and if it can separate multiple pages of one document out into individual notes.

[engberg 89]

We plan to add PDF support in the next couple of months, so you may just want to wait until then to import these documents correctly. In the mean time, you could information from apps that aren't directly supported by either copying the text to paste into Evernote, or possibly by using the Mac clipper to take a screenshot of a region of the screen into your account. Integrated PDF support is important to us, but we need to work through the cross-platform issues, since not every operating system includes deep, integrated PDF support...

[testing1234 0]

Is there a rough ballpark guess for PDF support?

[engberg 89]

Soon ... within the next month unless something goes terribly wrong.

[Jims 0]

Not a Mac user, but in Windows my response is this:

If you have Acrobat Professional, (or any number of PDF to JPG converter utilities*) you can take all your PDF's and batch convert them to JPG or TIFF images, especially if they are just scanned image items like receipts. It can be done over a number of files at once. Its pretty easy. Then,

• 1) Setup the Auto Import Folder (Account>Properties>File Auto-Import).
  2) Drag over or paste all of your existing (newly converted) files into the auto import folder.
  3) Any JPG or TIFF you drop in there will be imported as a single note. Multiple files will be imported as single notes all at once.

As for your scanner, if it permits you to, you can scan directly to your auto import folder and Evernote will pull them in. This was rather easily done in 2.2 and should work in 3.x. As for splitting files into separate pages/notes, most scanners have the ability to output one file per page in JPG or TIFF format. Most TIFF scans are one file per page. Again, if you scan directly to your import folder, each file will come in to EN as a single note.

Once in the "Notebook" AIR text recognition and indexing will take care of the "OCR" to the extent possible.

Just tested all of the above in 3.x, and it works. Not scanning into PDF (and converting the PDF's you already have) + auto-import is the solution.

*(You have to dig for a freeware converter. A good cheap one is at http://www.processtext.com/abcpdf2.html)