(Archived) Evernote Moleskine OCR

[john42 0]

I bought the evernote moleskine notebook and I am using the evernote app on my iPhone to take images of the pages, but I am having trouble getting it to properly read my handwriting. I am a software developer and I love evernote, but I am having trouble getting out of the habit of writing notes on paper. I know I don't have the best handwriting, but I was hoping at least if I wrote the project or bug numbers I am working on clearly, I would be able to search for them. I tried with bug numbers which are of the form ABC-12345. No matter how carefully I try to write, I cannot get the OCR to recognize all the letters correctly. It would be nice if I could see what letters the OCR thinks it is reading, so I had some feedback on how to write so it can recognize. I tried to contact evernote support. They told me to remove and re-install the iOS app, but that didn't help (Isn't the OCR on the evernote servers?). I haven't heard anything back in two days, so I don't know if anyone is looking into this. Not very happy with my purchase or with evernote support.

[gazumped 11,713]

Hi - welcome to the forums.  Handwriting recognition seems as much magic as science,  so you might want to cover your bets a little with important codes.  If you converted letters to numbers (so ABC-123 becomes 123-123) would that cause a problem?  (Other than with the mental hoops you'd have to jump through..)  I've seen an explanation of the OCR logic somewhere that says a 'tree' of possible meanings is prepared for each word,  so house also gets horse and hounds as possible options.  It may be that the logic behind the logic tree doesn't anticipate random letters as in your codes - it's looking to create actual words and alternates - so your ABC may get ARC and ANT as well - or maybe instead of - ABC.

 

Don't know whether using quotes would help with any searches - or you could just use the number part of the code and ignore the letters.  More hits,  but at least you should get the right one somewhere...