Kishi

Hello, For the past few days I've been trying to figure out search issues I have with Evernote and I installed Legacy to check how the things used to show up. Now I don't need legacy anymore and I want to remove in completely from my Mac, without breaking Evernote 10 installation. My search-fu must be very weak today, because I cannot find a single guide addressing the issue (what I found was on 3rd party sites and concerned much older versions of Evernote). Can anyone help with a link? Thanks!

Thank you for the help. I’ll make some screenshots and try to contact the support.

This is where I am the most confused. I have plenty of old PDFs I scanned directly to Evernote, which show properly and the search results are being highlighted. When I open them in another PDF viewer it too is capable of finding the text within these documents. Therefore they must be fully searchable This is not the case with the recently scanned PDFs - they pop up in the search results, but the highlights do not show. I get no results if I try to search within the note itself and if I open such a PDF with external software, it isn't capable of finding search terms either (i.e. they behave as if they are not searchable, but they still show up on the list of notes containing the query in the general search). Interestingly enough images containing text do not have that problem - they still show all the highlights properly just as they always had and are fully searchable. There's also another possible bug with the Mac desktop client. The iOS client is showing the highlights properly (where the PDF or the image are searchable of course, so the bug with suddenly unsearchable PDFs is still there), but the Mac OS Desktop client fails to properly highlight some PDFs - even if these are the "old" searchable PDFs . The vertical right-to-left Japanese prints are affected by this. I have to report it, but that is an unrelated bug I think.

I’ve started using Evernote around 10 years ago, drawn by the promise of its robust search functionality. Particularly, the ability to create searchable PDFs out of multilingual scanned files. At the time I was using OCR software, but it was dealing poorly with documents containing multiple languages, never mind things like relatively old Japanese printed materials (pre or post-war, we are not talking ancient history here). The Evernote was just perfect in what it could do - to the point I disabled all the PDF indexing options my scanning software had and deferred it all to Evernote. The results were just much much better, without putting any workload on me whatsoever. Since the pandemic started, I’ve continued to put new research material in my Evernote, but I had far fewer occasions to actually pull that data for the interpretation/translation work I do… so I haven’t noticed my PDFs are not being processed by the OCR software until very recently. I have some free time in August and I have to fix the issue somehow. I know that a lot of my PDFs going as far back as 2019 have not been processed. It is a weird situation where they do pop up in search results, suggesting that the Evernote has indexed them, but at the same time the search terms are not being highlighted within the PDFs themselves, so the OCR data has not been put back in the PDFs. Some older PDFs seem to be processed as expected (they both show in the results and show the highlights). I now need to get all my notes containing PDFs (relatively simple search, but the client seems to have a limit on number of items it shows in the results) and either force Evernote to re-scan them and OCR them properly, or I need to somehow batch-process them with OCR software on my desktop - I know Evernote can allow external app to edit attached files, but I’m not sure how to automate the process with the current edition. I’m using Mac OS X 11.5 and the newest version of Evernote client. I’ve been premium user for years and that puts me on Personal plan right now, I believe. My assumption that all the PDFs should be OCRed and made searchable by Evernote is mostly based on this article: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313388-Tips-for-searching-scanned-PDFs and my own experience from the past, when all the PDFs I’d put in Evernote would come up in the searches, with relevant terms highlighted. I’m sure that the PDFs I’m having problems with, in great majority, do not exceed limits described in the above-linked article. Is there anything I can do to fix my library of PDFs? Or should I start looking for a new home for them?

A PDF generated to be searchable from the start (either by OCR software or exported from Word, for example) does behave as I'd expect in Evernote - that is to say it is searchable and the serach results are highlighted properly. It's just the scans which were not processed by OCR before putting them in Evernote that fail to be OCRed. That is probably why my older notes are fully searchable - they've been processed once and all the data is stored within the PDF file. I've randomly checked multiple notes and PDFs scanned as far back as 6 months ago have not been OCRed by Evernote. I still get searchable PDFs from much older notes, but now I'm not even sure if it was Evernote which stopped OCRing the PDFs or if these older PDFs had been processed by the scanner software and I just remember it all wrongly. There's an Evernote guide page which suggests scanned PDFs should get OCRed for searching as long as they are clean scans (no handwriting OCR in PDFs): https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313388-Tips-for-searching-scanned-PDFs It just doesn't seem to be working anymore. Anyway, it has turned out to be more of a mess than I imagined. I now have tons of PDFs I need to OCR and there's no support for batch processing or Apple Script in the new Evernote.

Hello, I’ve been trying to troubleshoot identical problem for some time to no avail. I have tons of PDF accumulated over years of Evernote usage, many of them scanned. In the past Evernote would OCR all of them - they were not only indexed, but the search terms would get highlighted in the document itself. When I try to search for something in one of these older PDFs this still works, though it is far more cumbersome with the new client than it used to be (it used to show PDFs inline and highlights were applied automatically, now I need to open the PDF and manually search within the document). Nothing of the sort works with the newly created PDFs, even though they are created in exactly the same way. They are indexed properly, it seems, so some sort of OCR is happening… but the search results are not highlighted. If I attempt to search within the document itself, I simply get no hits. Even though the words must have been indexed, as the note containing the PDF is showing up in the general search. At the same time images get indexed properly and the search terms are still being highlighted without any problems. I vaguely remember there was an option to reset the search index in the old Evernote client, that would fix many search related problems… but it is not available in the troubleshooting menu anymore. Is this a database problem? If so how can I rebuild it? Or has the Evernote’s OCR changed and it no longer produces searchable PDFs the way it used to in the past?

I do have the newest version of the EN app. I’ll have to look deeper into it over the weekend. Thank you for the advice.

It still keeps freezing in my case. Specifically, if I do a search from within a specific notebook, rather than the general search, and leave the search string in the search field, the App inevitably freezes when re-opened.