(Archived) PDF OCR proccessing

[hectyre 0]

Hello,

Sorry if this is one of those common questions everyone asks but I have a little problem with Evernotes OCR and PDF files. I just got my new ScanSnap scanner and I signed up for a premium Evernote account. I uploaded quite a few documents lastnight (about 150) and none of them seem to be searchable yet. I was wondering if I'm maybe doing something wrong?

I have the quality on my scanner set to "better" and the scans seem crystal clear and I have the scan software set so that its doesnt OCR the files as I thought this was done by Evernote once the files had been uploaded.

Am I just being a little impatient or is something amiss? I stopped scanning last night at midnight GMT.

Thanks

[hectyre 0]

I probably should have mentioned that I scanned my paper invoices and converted them to PDF. Does this mean they aren't OCR'd ? I just tried scanning to JPG instead and the OCR works perfectly. I would have preferred to save them as PDF though

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

It's my understanding that EN only searches TEXT contents of PDFs while it does search for words in jpgs. IOW, if you scanned an invoice as a PDF, it's now an image & will not be searchable.

viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11949

[jbenson2 2,149]

To keep down the overall size of the PDF's, I let ScanSnap do the OCR to my documents before putting them into Evernote. This will prevent Evernote from creating a second version of the document.

In ScanSnap Manager, under File Option, just click on Searchable PDF (OCRs during the scan)

[engberg 89]

Unfortunately, someone (me :-( ) broke the OCR pipeline for PDFs late on Saturday night as part of a database optimization & upgrade. This means that new PDFs added to Premium accounts aren't being processed for text.

We'll fix the code early tomorrow morning (California time), and then we'll retroactively queue all of the new documents for processing. These should all be done processing tomorrow some time.

Sorry for the inconvenience ...

[hectyre 0]

No problem engberg , I'm just happy it wasn't me that messed something up! I scanned to jpg instead and that seems to work but I would like to use PDF in the future. Thanks for the replys.

[engberg 89]

One of our PDF OCR servers decided to take the day off, so it looks like the backlog won't be clear until tomorrow morning.

Mea culpa, again...

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Right now, it sucks to be you or David Letterman, eh?

[engberg 89]

The PDF processing caught up some time last night, so things should be working fine again.

Mr. Letterman got in trouble for doing something a lot more fun than database schema upgrades. :-)

[hectyre 0]

Thanks engberg, everything is working perfectly for me now. It's a pity the PDF ocr search doesn't highlight the string found but we cant have everything!

[engberg 89]

hectyre -

It sounds like you're using our Windows client. Since the Windows OS doesn't include any native support for the PDF format, we needed to license and bundle a third-party PDF rendering library in order to show any PDF preview when you look at your notes. That library doesn't support the search highlighting, but we aim to improve the PDF experience in the future (probably after 3.5 is all released and stable, since there's a pile of work to do there).

Thanks

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

The PDF processing caught up some time last night, so things should be working fine again.

Mr. Letterman got in trouble for doing something a lot more fun than database schema upgrades. :-)

True. But I'm guessing a week from now, no one will remember your goof up.

[hectyre 0]

Yes I'm using the windows client, 3.1 for now until 3.5 gets its bugs ironed out but it works really well for me. Do you want us all to go over to the Foxit forum and pester them for you? Just kidding, keep up the good work

[engberg 89]

:-) Thanks anyway. The Foxit folks have been great. They have a lot of different technologies we could use, but the work and licensing is all on our side. I.e. The ball's in our court.