OCR Selectively Functioning?

[Cambraceres 1]

Hello everyone, I am the very busy manager of a residential construction firm, and Evernote is one of the three systems that truly run this company. I am quite thankful,

That said, I have a serious issue that I need help with. I use the OCR function to have EN search through all the invoices to pick out specific part numbers, and assemble them on one screen so I can compare prices & specs. I am noticing that a significant portion of my 4k+ notes are simple PDF's with no searchability within them.

 

My only clue is that the recent ones are good, and searchable using the OCR Functionality, and all of these were uploaded by using the windows "send to" Option after downloading the PDF from a particular supplier. At least some of the notes uploaded using a scanner are not searchable. Is my scanner insufficient? I'm using a KM C364 PCL Officejet. Im at a loss and losing hours over this issue.

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi.  You quoted Android and Windows 8.1 in your tags - are you seeing the full PDF content as part of the note ("inline") on your Windows device,  or are PDFs showing as icons?  (That's going to happen on the Android because the idea is not to download the full content of a document unless/  until you choose to see it - that makes searches and note downloads much faster.)  You can right-click and toggle "view as attachment" to see the icon or the content on screen.

 

If you're uploading files sent by suppliers,  they may very well not have created 'searchable' PDF's from the original documents;  in which case they require OCR by you or (if you're a premium user) by Evernote.  I keep on seeing PDF OCR described as a "premium-only feature",  though I seem to remember from my early days that free-user PDFs were OCR'd as a lower priority than premium-user PDFs - either way for a business-critical feature it would seem worth the small monthly cost for 'guaranteed' OCR and tech support.  If you are premium and some PDFs aren't being OCR'd,  that's worth investigating - try scanning at 300DPI and do your own OCR if you can to ensure that your own PDFs are always indexed immediately.

 

If you need to see your invoices on the Android you could consider using JPGs (picture files) which will display inline with both the Android and Windows,  and will be OCR'd by Evernote - though possibly not as thoroughly as with a printed document.  You might want to do some testing on that alongside your current process to see whether it works for you..

 

If you have some PDFs that aren't searchable you could 'export' (save) the PDF to your desktop and OCR / re-attach it to the note - be careful if you're not Premium,  re-attaching the PDF will impact your upload quota,  which is 60MB/ month for free users 4GB/ month for premium users.  Any PDF package will include OCR,  plus there are bespoke OCR apps like ABBYY - http://www.abbyy.com/ which might be applicable.

 

Hope some of that helps - if you have more specific questions please post back here.

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

My only clue is that the recent ones are good, and searchable using the OCR Functionality, and all of these were uploaded by using the windows "send to" Option after downloading the PDF from a particular supplier. At least some of the notes uploaded using a scanner are not searchable. Is my scanner insufficient? I'm using a KM C364 PCL Officejet. Im at a loss and losing hours over this issue.

 

PDFs sent electronically to you from your suppliers are most likely text-based, and do NOT require OCR.  You can check this by opening the PDF and see if you can select any text.  These PDFs (from text) should be searchable in Evernote shortly after you upload to Evernote.

 

Obviously, scanned documents need to be OCR'd before they are searchable.  Many of us recommend that you do the OCR before uploading to Evernote.  If you are a Free Account owner, Evernote will NOT OCR these scanned documents.  If you are a Premium Account owner, Evernote will OCR these PDFs, but it make take a while -- usually within a hour, but sometimes longer.  You will need to sync Evernote to get the results of the OCR.