Search OCR PDFs with Plus?

[buckethead 218]

I could have sworn that in the past Evernote would search within PDFs that were OCR’d for plus users? Has this changed recently? I have a few PDFs that I can search through spotlight so I know they are searchable,  it EN does not find them on the Mac app or iOS app. 

[DTLow 5,736]

4 hours ago, buckethead said:

I could have sworn that in the past Evernote would search within PDFs that were OCR’d for plus users? Has this changed recently?

Officially, document search is a Premium account feature

I just tested on my Mac
- Premium Account: Yes
- Basic Account: No

Evernote's method of search/indexing pdfs is the generation of a pdf-text file that is stored alongside the pdf 
- there may be a backlog in this processing.  
I will give it some time, then test again

[CalS 5,280]

36 minutes ago, buckethead said:

I could have sworn that in the past Evernote would search within PDFs that were OCR’d for plus users?

If you OCR documents yourself they are searchable on EN no matter the subscription.  Not sure if Premium is required versus Plus if you want EN to perform the OCR.

[s2sailor 2,183]

42 minutes ago, CalS said:

Not sure if Premium is required versus Plus if you want EN to perform the OCR.

Document search appears to be a premium only feature, unless, as you mention, if you perform the OCR yourself.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005157-Compare-Evernote-subscription-plans

[buckethead 218]

2 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Document search appears to be a premium only feature, unless, as you mention, if you perform the OCR yourself.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005157-Compare-Evernote-subscription-plans

Yea. I had premium for years and switched to plus a year ago or so. Was always able to search within PDFs that I OCR’d, just not a few recent ones it seems. Maybe it is the backlog DTLow mentioned. 

 

Well I tested on my iPad this morning and the test note did not come up. Just loaded up MacBook and tested search and the test note came up (so you can search within PDFs you OCR). So then I tried on my iPhone and the note did not come up (this was 30 seconds after note came up on my MacBook).

 

This makes me wonder what the difference is for searching notes and why it will find a note on my MacBook, but not an iOS device.....

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Document search appears to be a premium only feature, unless, as you mention, if you perform the OCR yourself.

Document OCR'ing is definitely a Premium feature.  My history has been that already OCRd documents are searchable no matter the subscription level.  I have a Basic account I use for archiving of projects.and PDFs in notes in that account are searchable, last time I had to go the account, anyway.

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Document search appears to be a premium only feature, unless, as you mention, if you perform the OCR yourself.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005157-Compare-Evernote-subscription-plans

There's no mention of OCR in that document.

Interesting, handwriting and print is searchable in images for all account levels (ICR)

[s2sailor 2,183]

3 minutes ago, DTLow said:

There's no mention of OCR in that document.

You can infer it from this entry.

[s2sailor 2,183]

30 minutes ago, CalS said:

My history has been that already OCRd documents are searchable no matter the subscription level.  I have a Basic account I use for archiving of projects.and PDFs in notes in that account are searchable, last time I had to go the account, anyway.

I haven't tested it but that was my understanding as well.  Since getting a faster laptop a few years back I've been letting ScanSnap do the OCRing instead of EN.  I'm now the slowest part of the process 🙂.

[s2sailor 2,183]

1 hour ago, buckethead said:

This makes me wonder what the difference is for searching notes and why it will find a note on my MacBook, but not an iOS device.....

I don't have an answer for you but there has been a lot of discussion in the forums about inconsistent search results between clients, so I don't think you've discovered anything new.  Evernote is working to unify the editing experience across clients, and hopefully that will include the search algorithms.

[buckethead 218]

12 minutes ago, s2sailor said:

I haven't tested it but that was my understanding as well.  Since getting a faster laptop a few years back I've been letting ScanSnap do the OCRing instead of EN.  I'm now the slowest part of the process 🙂.

I have been using the iOS app Scanner Pro for OCR the last couple of years. Has worked just fine after switching from premium to plus a couple of years ago. 

[PinkElephant 8,073]

On the Mac, documents are stored locally, including their meta-content like OCR information.

On all mobiles, including iOS clients, all data is synced from the EN servers.

Probably OCR information is not synced if not on a Premium Account.

I am usually doing my own OCR as well, with my ScanSnap and with my iPhone scanner (ScannerPro from readdle). When OCRed locally, EN will not OCR it a second time on the server. So before deciding what strategy to follow, best thing is to make a test what works better.

[gazumped 11,652]

There are a few situations where Evernote will not OCR a PDF document, including where it has already been processed by another system.  As I understand it,  a processed (pre-OCR'd) document is searchable in all levels of Evernote.  Only Premium subscribers get to have their unprocessed PDF files OCR'd on Evernote's servers.

Where Evernote does the job,  the text content is saved as another file on the server (It's unconnected to the original PDF file).  I don't think an emailed or downloaded copy of that file would be searchable. 

If a file is OCR'd by a user in other software,  the images of the pages are replaced by the text equivalent,  so the original file is changed (and the file size reduced) with new content.  That searchable package is downloadable.

[PinkElephant 8,073]

... and pdfs OCRed by local services are searchable with other programs as well, be it search index on Windows or spotlight on Mac.

[buckethead 218]

22 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

... and pdfs OCRed by local services are searchable with other programs as well, be it search index on Windows or spotlight on Mac.

Which is one of the two reasons I started doing OCR myself. It would be nice if that transferred over to the iOS app. But I am wondering if 

[PinkElephant 8,073]

With iOS (or Android) things are different, because this are basically server based clients that only keep very limited data on the device itself. When the OCR data is inside of the note, the note has to download before it can be searched. On the mobiles, the notes will download only note by note.

Even with me, having set ALL notebooks as „offline“ on my iPad Pro I still do not have the performance on the iPad as on my Mac. I hope that with iPadOS and the new setup from EN this will be improved soon.

[buckethead 218]

10 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

With iOS (or Android) things are different, because this are basically server based clients that only keep very limited data on the device itself. When the OCR data is inside of the note, the note has to download before it can be searched. On the mobiles, the notes will download only note by note.

Even with me, having set ALL notebooks as „offline“ on my iPad Pro I still do not have the performance on the iPad as on my Mac. I hope that with iPadOS and the new setup from EN this will be improved soon.

Are you able to search for terms within PDFs on iOS and find notes though? It has been a couple of years since I downgraded to plus and I do not recall if I could or not. 

[PinkElephant 8,073]

Yes, it searches. It is not 100%, maybe because the OCR is off sometimes.

This is why I OCR most locally now. My impression is that EN does the OCR on the server based on a multilingual approach. But most of my stuff is in German, and if I choose this language and do it locally, OCR results improve.

If I stop my internet connection (flight mode), I get an error message, but it still searches. Now I have 100% of my notes offline, which probably explains why search results are (at least on some tests done right now) identical off- and online. If I remember it correctly, without having notes offline, search will only work when online.

[PinkElephant 8,073]

But there are other things I can’t do even with all notes downloaded. I can not perform actions on multiple notes at once (like tagging or moving to another notebook), and I can’t merge notes, or create a table-of-content note from several others.

These are actions I miss on iOS, readily available on Mac or Windows.

[DTLow 5,736]

59 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

If I stop my internet connection (flight mode), I get an error message, but it still searches.... If I remember it correctly, without having notes offline, search will only work when online.

With no internet, and no offline notes  Search has no data to work with;
- just a small index database
- even if notes are identified, they can't be displayed

[PinkElephant 8,073]

Obviously there is much amiss if the cloud data is not available.