scanning handwritten notes

[Jburlison 0]

hey guys, I am a premium member, and I have a epson workforce 3540 all in one.

I have a lot of handwritten notes that I need to put in evernote to be searchable. They are on lined notebooks, and should be searchable,but when I scan in nothing can be found. The document is a pdf and the search returns ZERO results.

I have scanned several different ways and have no idea where to turn to next...

I have read post, websites, etc and can not get it to work. Any help with this???

[gazumped 11,652]

Interpreting handwriting is more art than science (IMHO) and one thing that can throw off the OCR engine is extraneous marks in the page - like prominent lines.  Also unlike the ASCII characters for a word like "elephant",  scrawled handwritten letters are open to interpretation,  so the same word might get tagged "element" and "entrance".  If it's your handwriting,  you will be able to scan a page for content visually far faster than any automatic system - where I've scanned handwritten notes I usually add keywords to the note so I can find the necessary page later,  read it for myself,  and transcribe it if necessary to share with others.

 

Try scanning handwriiten notes on plain or very lightly lined paper to improve accuracy,  but I'd concentrate on adding keywords to the scanned pages so you can quickly find the right context when you need it.

[Jburlison 0]

Thanks for the reply. As far as scanning goes, what is the best workflow to get these in evernote... Scan to evernote or scan to text to evernote. Also, pdf or jpg is better?

[gazumped 11,652]

If it's feasible I'd suggest scanning pages to jpg - it will require a lot of scans but every page will be visible immediately instead of being hidden behind the visible icon or first page of the document.  Having separate scans also means that you can add keywords page by page.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. For the best results with handwriting, you'll want to use images instead of PDFs, because these are processed using Evernote's OCR service for handwriting. 

 

http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2013/07/18/how-evernotes-image-recognition-works/

When a note is sent to Evernote (via synchronization), any Resources included in the note that match the MIME types for PNG, JPG or GIF are sent to a different set of servers whose sole job is performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the supplied image and report back with whatever it finds.

 

Here are some suggestions I have for getting the most out of Evernote's OCR when dealing with handwriting. In general, if you have lines on the paper, you'll need to do a little bit of adjustment to each image. There may be a way to automate this process. Maybe Hazel (on Mac)? 

 

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=876

 

Going forward, you'll probably want to use unlined paper, if possible, or the Evernote Moleskine notebooks.