(Archived) What's The Purpose of 3rd Party OCR?

[jimmer 0]

Hi, guys

Brand new Evernote user here, and confused by one thing.

Prizmo is an OCR program, currently on 50% off sale at Macupdate. It proudly announces it's Evernote compatibility. And Evernote recommends Prizmo, here: http://www.evernote.com/about/trunk/items/prizmo?lang=en&layout=default&source=mobile_page

But I thought Evernote did OCR? So isn't this redundant?

[jimmer 0]

So you guys are as mystified by this as I am?

[lucianofuentes 1]

OCR is an Evernote premium feature. I'm guessing this app runs OCR before sending the PDF to Evernote.

[felix 0]

Evernote OCR makes the note searchable, but it doesn't actually give you the text. Third party OCR will let you have the text available as a text file.

[gazumped 12,223]

Actually if you're a Premium user and you upload a non-OCR'd PDF document, you can check back later and right-click it to save/ download a text version. There are a couple of limits on Evernote OCRring (currently 25MB file size and/or 100+ pages) and of course you can't OCR a document you password-protect for any reason. However if you save a reasonable description of your document in the same note you can find it easily enough, and if you've OCR'd it into a "searchable PDF file" (at least that's what Adobe calls it) you can search within the document to find your specific data. And if you have a technical document containing lots of geek-speak you'll likely want to OCR and verify the text yourself rather than leave it to the Evernote dictionary to mangle a translation. (No disrespect intended to the EN OCR process, but it's presumably meant to deal with standard wordage rather than techno-babble.)