Edit text in scanned documents?

[Niki Hardy 0]

As a writer I collect a lot of quotes and text from other papers and authors to quote or reference later. 
is there a way to scan these pages into Evernote so I can edit the text (copy and paste quotes into manuscripts later for example)?

the scannable app doesn’t seem to have this capacity.

at the moment I’m scanning text in apple notes then uploading to Evernote which is a pain.

 

thanks

[gazumped 11,697]

Hi.  Any reasonably-priced scanner should be able to convert a document into a searchable PDF which can be saved to a desktop folder and automatically imported into Evernote.  Alternatively apps like Adobe Scan or Microsoft Lens will work for mobiles.  Save those scans to a cloud drive folder configured as an Import Folder.  

[Niki Hardy 0]

Thanks @gazumped I’m trying to avoid external scanners and going via the pdf route. I was hoping Evernote had the same capabilities as apple notes to scan to text straight into the notes section.

[Mike P 2,658]

It's always worth remembering the way EN does OCR on scanned docs or images. It is not doing a one to one interpretation like traditionl OCR. It is coming up with many different possibilities - particular if the image quality is poor. So it might interpret a word as but, bet or bat for example. This means that when we search (the only reason EN does OCR) we are very likely to get the correct result but at the expense of some false positives.

This paradigm doesn't really translate to providing editable text to work on. There are so many traditional ocr systems aout there I'm not sure EN really needs to enter the fray.

[PinkElephant 8,165]

Apple Notes borrows this capability from the OS (MacOS or iOS) - it doesn’t come natively. And it is restricted to the newer devices, mostly those running on Apple Silicon. Even older Macs are left without, not talking about all the other platforms.

EN to assure a harmonized OCR experience to all users, on all platforms uses OCR performed on the cloud server. This works independently from the platform of the client, that may or may not support integrated OCR.

Plus as pointed out by @Mike P OCR optimized for searching will not provide an editable text layer. The OCR result is embedded invisibly into the note, and it is optimized for search, not for display.

[Niki Hardy 0]

Thanks. I can understand why. It’s just for my work it would be a nice to have option and I was simply asking if EN had the capability and I just hadn’t found it!

[PinkElephant 8,165]

On a Mac you could try OwlOCR. It’s free, it’s good and it installs some options into the right click menu, making it easy to perform an OCR on the fly. You need to export from EN first, it can’t transform a pdf while it is stored inside of the app.