(Archived) Feature Request:PDF Image Recognition

[robs 0]

Many multi-function devices default to PDF format for scanned images, especially multi-page documents. I'd like to see Evernote recognize text images saved in PDF format.

[engberg 89]

Thanks, this is something we'd like to add, but it's a bit more work than we expected, so we haven't been able to do it yet.

[arcangelmd 0]

I'm not surprised that handling anything with Adobe's PDF format is harder than expected

Wouldn't an easy bypass be a feature that has your backend software that autoconvert PDF's to a jpeg or something than uses your traditional text recognition program?

[engberg 89]

If PDF documents only contained a single JPEG image, this would be pretty simple. The problem is that we see PDFs in Evernote that have hundreds of pages with many many images of different types. This makes it more complicated than a simple image file.

But this is definitely something we'd like to see happen.

[shanecowherd 0]

What about a "convert note to image" option. I uploaded a bunch of picture pdfs before I realized I couldn't search them. Thanks!

[engberg 89]

We don't have an easy way to extract all of the images in your PDF document into separate images in one (or multiple) notes, but we are planning to retroactively process image PDFs that are already in the system when we roll out a PDF image recognition system.

Thanks

[Scoobey 0]

Dave - do you mean you're adding a OCR function that will read and index pdfs even if they're not originally input that way? If so, kewl! If not, it would be helpful -- I have pdfs I'd like to get indexed but don't want to buy Acrobat Pro. Thanks!

[engberg 89]

We plan to add some form of search for images within PDF documents, but haven't determined exactly the "right" way to do this. E.g. we could replace your PDF with a PDF that looks the same but contains a text "layer" over the images like desktop PDF OCR software does, but this would essentially discard your old PDF, which might be a problem for some people. Putting a second PDF into the note might be ugly, etc.

So I don't think we know exactly the right solution for usability on this feature.