(Archived) Student Best Practice - Annotate PDF text book scans

[jmichl 0]

I'm in my late 40's and starting grad school in a few weeks. I work fulltime during the day and will take classes at night. My back can't handle lugging around two laptops (work and personal) and jumbo sized textbooks. I just got a great price on used text books at Amazon. (http://bit.ly/AmzTextBooks So great, in fact, that I'm willing to rip apart my first text book so I can just carry a chapter with me at a time. Seeing the recent announcement about searchable PDFs with Evernote Premium, I wondered about scanning these chapters into PDF files and not lugging any paper with me. This would be ideal but I will need to take notes in the files. I haven't used Evernote for PDFs yet so I'm not sure if this would be workable.

Any thoughts?

Any other best practices for students would be appreciated, as well. I use a Mac but also use VMWare with Office 2007 for a few of the classes. I was considering using OneNote for my school notes but if Evernote can do the trick I'd rather send my bucks to the Elephant!

[Vcube 0]

In my opinion, it would be easier to scan + OCR directly before sending to EN (with OCR IRIS software for example, http://www.irislink.com. You have free version delivered with some Scanners (HP)). These OCR PDF files are usually far smaller than raw ones, and are faster to transfer to/from EN.

You can write short notes directly within PDF with Foxit reader.

[Vcube 0]

One more point. Attachment size is limited to 25 Mb, so you may have problems to store them in EN if you don't "OCR" them before.

[engberg 89]

In general, if you're using a decent scanner to scan black-and-white printed text, you don't need to use the absolute highest resolution color/greyscale scanning mode. You'll get just as good results at a fraction of the file size with a black & white scan ad medium resolution. The crazy high-rez modes are for scanning things like photos that require lots of subtle gradiations, etc. Text is pretty simple stuff.