(Archived) How to get OCR recognition of ink note to work?

[cavanaughmm 0]

I'm testing out the ability to search a handwritten note in EN (EN4 Windows client, using Win XP). It doesn't seem to be working the way I expected. Probably I'm doing something wrong, so perhaps someone could help?

Here's what I tried:

1. Created a "new ink note" by drawing a few words with my fingertip on little touchpad on the laptop. These are pretty sloppy, understandably... it looks more like words scribbled randomly on the page.

2. Saved the note to my "Test Notebook" notebook. I did not give it a name, as I was hoping that EN would create a name from the first few words. EN did not: the note iss listed as "Untitled Note"

3. Clicked "sync" to make sure my notebooks are all synced between my desktop client and web versions (don't know if that would matter here but I figured why not )

4. Searched in that notebook for each of the words in that ink note... little words like "if" and "it" and bigger words like "laptop" and "hand" (am I sounding a bit Dr Suess-like?). Every search ended in a "no notes found" response. In other words, EN did not find any of my inked notes.

I was expecting the note to be found. Have I misunderstood EN's capabilities? Is the note not being found because my scribbled notes are just too unintelligible? Does OCR not work notes that are directly-inked-into-EN? Is my laptop's way of creating "inked" files not compatible with EN's OCR?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[TheGurkha 1]

The text recognition happens in the cloud, so the new note has to be titled New Note because your EN Client can't perform the OCR type of actions that take place inthe EN servers. Without that capability of course, the Client has to default to New Note.

You have to synch to the servers, wait for the OCR action to take place and then re-synch again. The time it takes to have the OCR data sent back to your client depends on the size of the image queue and whether you are a free or premium user (premium users are handled in preference to the free users. As there have been issues over the last couple of days for a lot of folk synching to the servers, there may well be more of a delay than usual right now.

Remember too, if your handwriting is just too poorly formed ('sloppy' as you put it) then the note might be unintelligible even to the pretty amazing EN OCR software.

(actually it isn't OCR like you might understand OCR. The EN server software builds a tree of the possibilities for each word, and then that data is sent back to your client and associated with the note. This means that if it isn't sure whether you wrote herring or hemming, both of those possibilites are associated with the note. That means you'd find the note by searching for either herring or hemming.)

[cavanaughmm 0]

(actually it isn't OCR like you might understand OCR. The EN server software builds a tree of the possibilities for each word, and then that data is sent back to your client and associated with the note. This means that if it isn't sure whether you wrote herring or hemming, both of those possibilites are associated with the note. That means you'd find the note by searching for either herring or hemming.)

Sounds like magic to me!

Thanks for the clarification on EN's means of recognizing ink. Sounds like I just need to wait a few hrs and re-sync. That will be awesome.