"Find in Note" in scanned PDF: no results, no highlights - even though search term occurs in note

[joschaf 0]

Hi, I'm having a search/find problem with scanned PDF files. They are listed as expected in Search Notes if they contain the search term, but if I then enter the search term in Find in Note to see where in the note the search term occurs, EN says "no results", and nothing gets highlighted. (I'm using EN for Mac v10.17.6 and the web client - same problem.)

So now I know that my search term occurs somewhere in a 30-page scanned PDF file, but I still have to read through the entire thing to find the right spot.

is this normal/intended or is there something wrong - and if so, how can I help to fix it?

[gazumped 11,658]

Hi.  Is this a third-party PDF or your own document?  And was it already searchable,  or has it been indexed by Evernote?  If you can open the PDF in a reader outside of Evernote you should be able to search for that term in another app.  Can't comment in detail because I'm not an iOS-user;  sorry...

[PinkElephant 8,091]

To search inside of a note and attachments, there is an own menu option in the Note menu of the desktop client.

It is called „Search and Replace“, shortcut shift-cmd-F. In a pdf it won‘t replace, but it searches and highlights.

You get a box with a field for the search string, another for the replacement (leave it empty when only searching). There are some more options, and bottom right there are arrow buttons to jump between the highlighted hits.

On iOS / mobile it is different: Open the pdf, tap on the magnifying glas. Enter the search string, and you get a list with all hits. Click on one to jump to the spot.

[joschaf 0]

@PinkElephant, what you are describing is what I mean by "Find in Note". (I think nowadays it's called "Find and Replace", I didn't notice that before, so thanks. I think it used to be called "Find in Note" and had the same keyboard shortcut.) That's exactly what doesn't work with scanned PDF files, even though it should.

@gazumped, I use Scannable to scan and add to Evernote all the PDFs I'm talking about here. If I open them in other apps, e.g. the macOS Preview app, they are not searchable, either. But Evernote must have indexed them because the notes are listed as search results when I use `cmd+alt+F` to search for a search term. But when I then want to find all the occurrences of the search term within the note (using `cmd+shift+F`), it says "no results", and nothing gets highlighted.

A curious side note on Evernote's Scannable app: It lets me save scans either as images or as a PDF. When I save the same scan as an image, the highlighting works, but saved as a PDF, it doesn't.

But it should, right?

[PinkElephant 8,091]

The OCR on pictures is different to the one on PDFs. In pictures handwriting is OCRed, in PDFs it is not. 

Here is some more information about search in PDFs:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313388-Tips-for-searching-scanned-PDFs

And this is about picture OCR:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208314518

When you have checked everything in the help documents, and can’t find a solution, I would contact support about it.

I have my scanners do most of the OCRing. So I only rarely rely on the build in OCR, and have not that much experience with the results.

The few examples I have work okay.

[Kishi 4]

Hello,

I’ve been trying to troubleshoot identical problem for some time to no avail. 
I have tons of PDF accumulated over years of Evernote usage, many of them scanned. In the past Evernote would OCR all of them - they were not only indexed, but the search terms would get highlighted in the document itself. When I try to search for something in one of these older PDFs this still works, though it is far more cumbersome with the new client than it used to be (it used to show PDFs inline and highlights were applied automatically, now I need to open the PDF and manually search within the document).

 

Nothing of the sort works with the newly created PDFs, even though they are created in exactly the same way. They are indexed properly, it seems, so some sort of OCR is happening… but the search results are not highlighted. If I attempt to search within the document itself, I simply get no hits. Even though the words must have been indexed, as the note containing the PDF is showing up in the general search.

At the same time images get indexed properly and the search terms are still being highlighted without any problems.

 

I vaguely remember there was an option to reset the search index in the old Evernote client, that would fix many search related problems… but it is not available in the troubleshooting menu anymore. Is this a database problem? If so how can I rebuild it?
 

Or has the Evernote’s OCR changed and it no longer produces searchable PDFs the way it used to in the past?

[gazumped 11,658]

Hi.  I'm afraid most of your questions are unanswerable unless you have access to email support - this is a mainly user2user Forum and we're pretty much in the dark with details of how the new v10 operates.  I do know there's no search reset available.  If you can OCR a PDF locally it might be interesting to see whether a pre-processed PDF is shown differently to an Evernote OCR,  but if you're seeing differences,  you can only raise a support ticket and/ or revert to the Legacy app for PDF work...

[Kishi 4]

A PDF generated to be searchable from the start (either by OCR software or exported from Word, for example) does behave as I'd expect in Evernote - that is to say it is searchable and the serach results are highlighted properly. It's just the scans which were not processed by OCR before putting them in Evernote that fail to be OCRed. That is probably why my older notes are fully searchable - they've been processed once and all the data is stored within the PDF file.

I've randomly checked multiple notes and PDFs scanned as far back as 6 months ago have not been OCRed by Evernote. I still get searchable PDFs from much older notes, but now I'm not even sure if it was Evernote which stopped OCRing the PDFs or if these older PDFs had been processed by the scanner software and I just remember it all wrongly.

There's an Evernote guide page which suggests scanned PDFs should get OCRed for searching as long as they are clean scans (no handwriting OCR in PDFs): https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313388-Tips-for-searching-scanned-PDFs

It just doesn't seem to be working anymore.

 

Anyway, it has turned out to be more of a mess than I imagined. I now have tons of PDFs I need to OCR and there's no support for batch processing or Apple Script in the new Evernote. 

[PinkElephant 8,091]

Search in PDFs is a feature of the subscribers, level above PLUS.

If you qualify, and it does not work, contact support.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/requests/new