(Archived) Create notes from notes

[HarperMind 1]

I sure hope this isn't a really easy question to answer because I have looked a bunch and cant find it. Let me start by explaining the use situation.

We are trying to move to a more paperless lifestyle at home, so I am taking my wives many cookbooks and scanning them into Evernote. After scanning a number of these books it seems to be hard for her to find recipes on her ipad from within a 300 page book.

The questions are as follows.

1: Is there a way to clip a recipe from an existing note to organizer her more often used recipes?

2: Not all the scanned books seem to be very searchable. Any tricks you might have to make them better for searching?

Thanks in advance.

[gazumped 11,652]

hard ... to find recipes ... from within a 300 page book

- Are you scanning these recipe books into 300-page PDF files that occupy separate notes? Or do you scan one page (or one recipe) into one note? The best organisation (I'd suggest) would be one recipe to one Evernote note, so that a search for "stew" will show all the relevant recipes immediately. If you have all recipes in one PDF file, you'll have to search for "stew" in Evernote, then do the search again in each individual PDF file to find the correct page. If you want to link all the recipes from one book, use a common tag or (if you must) a separate notebook. Tags likewise can highlight all the recipes that are gluten-free or vegan or favourites.

If you already have lots of 300-page PDFs, open a file in your PDF editor of choice and look for the "extract pages" or "split document" options. You'll get a chance to generate 300 single pages (or every 2, 3 etc) if that works for you - otherwise you can select the pages you wish to split out and delete them from the main document after extraction.

Regarding your specific questions -

1: Is there a way to clip a recipe from an existing note to organizer her more often used recipes?

Again - if the note is a PDF file, double click to open it from Evernote in an editor; choose the recipe pages and extract those pages to a new PDF. Save it to your desktop. Delete the extracted pages from the original PDF file and save it back to the note. Drag the new file into a new note and title/tag appropriately.

2: Not all the scanned books seem to be very searchable. Any tricks you might have to make them better for searching?

One recipe to a note as above - and; do your own OCR. No criticism of Evernote's in house process (which only applies if you're a Premium member anyway..) but specialised words and terms are apt to confuse the process. If you do it yourself, you can educate your own software to recognise the terms it needs. And you don't take up resources the rest of us might need.

Hope that helps - if I jumped to any wildly incorrect apprehensions, please explain again exactly what process you're using to convert books into notes within (presumably) one "recipes" notebook.

Happy Christmas.

[HarperMind 1]

Browncoat,

Thanks for the reply, let me further explain my situation.

I have already scanned these cookbooks, so I have a note in EN that is 300 pages long with multiple recipes.

Do I understand that I need to export the note in PDF format then split it up with a PDF editor? I just assumed I could edit the note inside EN.

How do I export the note in PDF format from EN?

Thanks again for your information.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

evernote holds your stuff. it is not a replacement for word, excel, adobe, etc. you'll need to open the pdf up in another program. right-click, save as, and then pick a place. i use adobe acrobat pro to split files and do ocr (make it searchable), but if you split the file up into 300 parts using preview or other free pdf programs, evernote can do the ocr for you.

[HarperMind 1]

Browncoat,

Again thanks for the information. I understand what your saying about it replacing word, excel etc. I was hoping EN could allow me to split and merge notes however. The save as is a great tip but I want to let anyone who is following this conversation that to do the save as you must click on the note in the preview pane not just the not itself in the notebook.

[gazumped 11,652]

<grin> there's a lot of us browncoats around here.. It's always difficult explaining a problem in enough detail to show clearly what's happening (or not) to you so that we can fumble out some suggestions that may or may not be helpful.. I think I understand that you're scanning the books and putting the actual text in a note - which should be good for searching; look for "stew" and every occurance of the word will be highlighted. But there's no way in Evernote to tag line 499 in a given note as the start of a favourite recipe, except that you could add a unique comment (eg "##fav stew 01") to the note at that point, and save the search for "##fav stew*".

Merging notes is easy - look for ~note ~merge notes on your menu bar. Splitting notes likewise - highlight the bit you want to split out and ~cut, go to a new note and ~paste.

Likewise PDF-ing a note - cut and paste into your WP-of-choice and save as or print to a PDF file.

If you have scanned all your cookbooks into text notes, the weeding out process should be fairly simple - (I talk a lot about "gardening" my notes to get the best search results). When your wife -eventually- finds a recipe/ recipes she wants to highlight, just cut and paste each one into a new note and short-term tag it "favourite" and anything else that seems relevant.

If we still haven't answered your query properly, can you explain a little more why your wife finds it hard to get to the recipes she wants? What does she search for?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

1: Is there a way to clip a recipe from an existing note to organizer her more often used recipes?

An option to splitting up the PDF may be to either scan the recipes separately or, call up the recipe in the PDF & take a screen cap of it. Personally, I prefer to not scan the entire cookbook but rather scan the recipes I've tried & like or those I want to try.

You may find this thread helpful.

I am taking my wives many cookbooks and scanning them into Evernote.

How many wives do you have??? (Sorry, I couldn't resist...)

[jmpsfs 23]

I've had no serious problems with Evernote's PDF indexing, but I have had big problems with the iPad's search speed.

That may be where you main problem lies, so I'd suggest duplicating the search in your desktop app to see if it works there. If it takes as long as it does on the iPad, forget I made the suggestion.

By choice, I have EN handle my PDF indexing even though I could do it before the upload, but that lengthens the scan time considerably, more than my patience will tolerate.