Unimpressive OCR and user interface

[pion 0]

I am a trial user of EN, and at this point I must say it's not very impressive: EN did OCR some of the files I scanned in but not all. Read somewhere that there is 25 MB limitation, but how do you even check the files size, apparently not a straightforward task which is ridiculous. Also, while I was scanning (with Android app) it should warn when you approach that arbitrary OCR file-size limitation such that you could split the file into separate ones. That would be a work-around albeit a bad one. 

It looks like this program just does too many things such that it doesn't do the one thing I care real well. So I am looking for a plain-vanilla Android (or IOS) based application, where I can just very quickly scan in docs with my phone, save it locally, and make it searchable. Gladly would I pay for such a plain vanilla app. If anybody knows one to recommend that would be great. Thanks.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

As you have discovered, Evernote is not an OCR application. Its a note-taking/information management application that happens to also index PDFs and make images of text searchable in Evernote. It does not create a text layer that is extractable like other dedicated OCR tools (e.g., Adobe or ABBYY). 

While I have found the handwriting recognition to be immensely useful, that's really one small part of how Evernote is/can be used. 

 

As for file size limits, 25mb is fairly large for a single scan, but certainly it can easily be exceeded. If you anticipate routinely making scans that are larger than 25mb you'd be wise to upgrade to plus or premium subscriptions which allow 50mb and 200mb maximums respectively. 

 

As for checking the size, you can take any file you want to attach, including scans made with your mobile device, and look at the file size prior to attaching it to an Evernote note. In general you'd have to be scanning a large number of pages to approach 25mb, and if that is a relatively common thing you do, it might be in your interest to perform that scan using your favourite scanning application, checking the file size once you have completed scanning, and only at that point adding it to Evernote. 

 

PDFpen is an iOS (and Mac) application that can perform OCR, even locally on an iOS device. It is solely dedicated to scanning and performing OCR (and embedding that OCR into the file, which Evernote does not do because Evernote uses a very different process). PDFpen does allow you to then send the file to any number of cloud services including Evernote. It's one of the few applications I am aware of that will perform true OCR on a mobile device. The OCR engine is relatively good, reasonably fast, but the accuracy is inferior to other options (such as Adobe and ABBYY which both beat the pants of PDFpen in terms of accuracy, but also in price). 

 

If you need to do large OCR tasks, that is definitely a job better suited for a computer rather than a mobile device. A computer will be able to accomplish that task much faster, and if accuracy is a concern, there are more options with greater accuracy. Using desktop OCR software doesn't preclude the use of a mobile scanning app like PDFpen or Scanner Pro or Scannable to generate the initial scan. You'd just have to dump that scan onto your computer, OCR it, and toss it into Evernote. 

 

Hope that's a bit helpful.