PDF not OCR'ed

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

Is there a way to manually activate OCR for a particular note containing a PDF?  I have found one PDF that has not been converted.  (Have not yet checked others.)  Its image quality seems very good.  

 

More generally: What is the consensus on how effective EN is these days on automatically OCRing PDFs consisting of image only?  I gather some find EN's OCR performance is sketchy.

 

Thanks...

 

p.s. I use Evernote for Mac and, of course, access EN on the web.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

If you have more than a few scanned PDFs you will be well served by doing the OCR with another app PRIOR to attaching to Evernote:

1. You will have access to the actual text that is OCR'd, allowing you to select, copy, highlight, etc.
2. Many OCR apps (like Adobe Acrobat) are more accurate than Evernote.
3. Very shortly after you import the pre-OCR'd PDF into Evernote, it will be searchable, even if you are using a FREE account.  I have never run into an issue with Evernote searching my PDFs.

 

In direct answer to your question, I do not know of any way to cause Evernote to OCR, or re-OCR a specific PDF, other than removing the PDF, sync, and reattaching the PDF.

[CalS 5,280]

Don''t know if there is an equivalent on Mac, but on Windows if you hold Ctrl while pressing help an option to Fix Current Note appears.  I believe this will OCR the PDF in the note provided the PDF does not contain renderable text.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Don''t know if there is an equivalent on Mac, but on Windows if you hold Ctrl while pressing help an option to Fix Current Note appears.  I believe this will OCR the PDF in the note provided the PDF does not contain renderable text.

 

Unfortunately, there is no EN Mac equivalent.

[CalS 5,280]

Shucks.

[DutchPete 247]

There is a free app that does an excellent OCR job: PDF-Xchange Viewer. What's more, it has plugins so you can OCR documents that are in different languages too.

This is, or any other app that can do PDF OCR-ing for you, is an easier an quicker way than having to wait for EN's slow OCR process, which you cannot be sure of beforehand how long it'll take.

[Jwarcd 0]

Heh.  Just learned that OneNote has OCR capability, and it works great.  

 

Good-bye Pemium EN.  This was one of the only reasons I chose to use Premium, and it does not work.  

 

 

[DutchPete 247]

11 hours ago, Jwarcd said:

Heh.  Just learned that OneNote has OCR capability, and it works great.  

 

Good-bye Pemium EN.  This was one of the only reasons I chose to use Premium, and it does not work.  

 

 

You are right OneNote has an excellent OCR capability, and if you have the desktop version you don't even have to rely on a cloud server to do the OCR-ing for you, like with EN.

However, I think the 1N OCR-ing can only be done on an embedded object. So if you need to have your PDF attachment OCR-ed, then you need a PDF app that can do that. PDF-XChange Viewer, or its more modern successor PDF-XChange Editor, does an excellent job, among its many other impressive features.