How to scan a document or business card with iPhone to add to Note

[MarkRNYC 0]

The instructions say "Tap the arrow on the new note button, then tap Scan a document" " but there is nothing that says "Scan a document". 

If I tap on the camera icon in a note the options are only "auto" or "photo" but there is wording that says "try scanning documents, whiteboards and business ..." but I don't see how to specify "scan." I would like to scan as a PDF and not take a photo

 

If I click "+New" on the home screen, the app give me options of camera, sketch, attach and audio. If I select the camera icon, it takes me to the place I described above.

Is there a way to scan something into Evernote as a PDF that displays as an open PDF so I can read the contents without clicking to open a file? I have emailed PDFs to Evernote but then I have to open each one to see the contents when I want to page through Notes.

Thanks for any advice. There seems to be no way to chat live or call or email Evernote with questions. 

 

Mark

[PinkElephant 8,744]

Access the camera from the app - either by new note-camera, or by the camera symbol from within of a note.

Take the picture of the BC.

Either it recognizes it automatically as a BC - then hit save, done.

If it doesn't , there is a document type selector below the "save as" text. Tap on the down arrow, select BC (it's the bottom most option), hit save, done.

EN will try to extract the relevant information from the card and place it in the according fields. You can later tap own the card in the note and edit it.

 

Hints:

1) The camera focus doesn't work well with iPhones 14 and younger. It is a well know bug from other apps as well, but still not fixed. They need to change the camera SDK, but haven't done it yet.

2) The recognition is sometimes, ok, often not.

3) It has some weird properties. I tried to save for example a BC from a person from a very large company. So his internal phone number was pretty long, including the country and area code, main number and extension. It was exactly 1 digit longer as the maximum allowed by EN for phone numbers. Whenever I added the last digit manually, the first digit of the country code was erased. When I entered it again, the last digit of the extension was erased. I had no chance to store the full number.

In general it tries to press every number into an US number format, no matter from where in the world.

4) It won't sync with your contacts app.

I don't use the BC function because of these deficiencies.

[MarkRNYC 0]

Thanks very much. I appreciate the details. Have you ever done this with a larger piece of paper (8.5 x 11) with notes on it? I'm trying to do that too but it seems to take a photo when I want a PDF. 

I keep looking for the Scan a document button but it doesn't seem to exist so I think the instructions are in error  

 

Thanks again!

[PinkElephant 8,744]

The build in scanner will always produce a picture, type PNG. Which is not necessarily bad: The EN OCR will only work on handwriting when the file is a picture (PNG, JPG, GIF). Handwriting in PDFs is ignored.

To get a pdf with the scan, you can try to print the note to a pdf, or export it to pdf. However control over the outcome is not good.

EN has a separate app called Scannable. This can produce a pdf and send it into EN. A warning: It is old code, and not well maintained.

As 3rd party scanner you can try Lens from Microsoft. It’s a decent scanner app, can make a pdf and it’s free. Share the result into EN.

Last tip for a paid scanner: Scanner Pro from readdle. It is very powerful (own OCR, page manager) and has workflows that can send a scan into EN, into a specified notebook and with a standard set of tags.

Which solution to use depends on your scanning needs and volume.

[VincentC 337]

On 11/15/2023 at 8:18 PM, MarkRNYC said:

Is there a way to scan something into Evernote as a PDF that displays as an open PDF so I can read the contents without clicking to open a file? I have emailed PDFs to Evernote but then I have to open each one to see the contents when I want to page through Notes.

There is a setting that may be relevant to this particular part of your question:  have you selected "all pages" under Tools/Settings/Notes?  If you have not, you will only see the file title bar, or a single page of the pdf in your note.  (Tools/Settings/Notes is how to get there on the Windows desktop client - I'm not familiar with other clients.)

Vinnie

[MarkRNYC 0]

On 11/17/2023 at 12:41 AM, PinkElephant said:

The build in scanner will always produce a picture, type PNG. Which is not necessarily bad: The EN OCR will only work on handwriting when the file is a picture (PNG, JPG, GIF). Handwriting in PDFs is ignored.

To get a pdf with the scan, you can try to print the note to a pdf, or export it to pdf. However control over the outcome is not good.

EN has a separate app called Scannable. This can produce a pdf and send it into EN. A warning: It is old code, and not well maintained.

As 3rd party scanner you can try Lens from Microsoft. It’s a decent scanner app, can make a pdf and it’s free. Share the result into EN.

Last tip for a paid scanner: Scanner Pro from readdle. It is very powerful (own OCR, page manager) and has workflows that can send a scan into EN, into a specified notebook and with a standard set of tags.

Which solution to use depends on your scanning needs and volume.

Thanks. I generally use Genius Scan to create PDFs via my iPhone camera. It's pretty great but to get it to EN, I have to email it and it appears as an attachment in EN and I'd like to see it as I use EN and not have to click on it to open it so I can read it. I'm looking for a solution that is always an "open page/scan" in EN. Thanks for your thoughts. 

[PinkElephant 8,744]

Make sure it is send as a file that can be directly displayed - jpg, gif, png.

Make sure in your app settings the display option is to show the attachment, not the title only.

[agsteele 3,058]

The default view for all attachments on the mobile versions of Evernote is with the file attachment showing the file name. You have to click to open a PDF.

Images in a supported format will display in the note. So to achieve what you want on a mobile device scan to an image.