Notes imported from Moleskine Notebooks

[jsrnephdoc 4]

I've purchsed a Moleskine "smart" notebook, entered some text, photographed the page, and created an Evernote note from the scanned page.

 

My handwriting is not Palmer method pure, but it's not awful. The text recognition engine produces variable results. Note searches find some of the unique words, not others.

 

My question is whether there's any way to edit the results of the search (and, by extension), READ the scanned text in the note in Evernote.

 

The scanning software seems to have a huge problem with numbers. Any fixes for that?

 

Thanks so much,

 

Jim Robertspn

[gazumped 11,652]

Handwriting recognition is as much art as science.  If you write in black ink on a light background without lines or patterns,  the software will make the best guess it can at the word your handwriting was meant to convey.

 

"House" however maybe could be Horse or Homes,  so the HR software will note all three of them as being possible choices.  The same applies to the rest of  your document.  Unlike OCR however this translation is not available to download and you can't copy and paste text from it.  

 

So searches for 'horse' may generate a note with 'house' highlighted by mistake.

 

To get the best results - obviously - write as clearly as you can;  black ink / light background and avoid strong lines or patterns.  Photograph or scan the note in good light and on a contrasting background with Evernote's document camera.

 

Evernote will do the best it can with whatever you can give it - and in many cases it does a scarily good job.  But if it goes sadly wrong,  there's not much you can do.  There's no way to correct it,  other than by typing the correct keywords into the title or an opening comment.

 

Tip:  I have scanned page after page of my old spiral-bound scribble-covered small notebooks into Evernote - I'll put an executive summary at the start of the note,  and I may split the pages at various points so I can add more keywords or summaries.  They are all searchable,  and provided I know that this note includes the lecture on "the structure of the eye" I can usually find the section I need far faster by reading and paging through my old notes than I could by searching for terms which might or might not be in there.

 

Chris Mayo (Grumpymonkey in the forums) has looked at this in more depth here - http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=876