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Hi,
Is OCR for pdf’s or another multi-page image format on the drawing boards…that would be very useful.

Have I missed a way to do this on a PC?

I have been looking on the apple website for a list of supported scanners and I have been unable to find one.

What scanner are you using? Do you have a list of supported ones?

Thanks

Do

I use a slightly different approach on a PC (not sure if my scanner software has an ‘automatic task’ option.

In Evernote I set up an Automatic File Import location (Account–>Properties–>File Import). I then just scan into that folder. Presto chango, it’s in Evernote as soon as it hits that folder.

I have made this work with network scanners as well by having all my scans go into a folder on my desktop called “Scanned”. I then enabled folder actions and added the following Folder Action script. Note I put a long delay in as I was having some issues with long (>5 page) docs. Your mileage may vary.

(*
add – new item into Evernote

*)

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
delay 60
tell application “Evernote”
create note from file added_items notebook “Scanned”

end tell

end adding folder items to

awesome blog post. I’ll be trying to implement this set up with the Canon CanoScan 8800F Scanner shortly!

I use the ScanSnap scanner (Fujitsu-$495.00) and it is brilliant. It’s software allows it to scan directly into Evernote. It’s dead easy with a Mac. This scanner is so good, I can’t believe anyone would use anything else.

Also, an addition to the tip. For those who stopped at “step 2. if your scanner is supported” here is the easy open source work around to get your unsupported scanner to function just the same.

(if you don’t want to mess with terminal and all that just scroll down to “pizzacake”’s solution which is simple.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050604045428475&lsrc=osxh

I have been doing this for a long time. So good for receipts etc I have also started doing all shopping dockets so if I ever want I can get a feel of the frequency I buy certain things and compare supermarket prices. One question though, does anyone have any tips for a multiple page scanner? I have seen ones where you can scan a bunch of pages at once but have no idea which one to look at. Any tips would be great.

What I’ve been doing for multi-page notes is something along the following lines:

Jpeg method:
-Scan all pages of the doc into some folder (one that Evernote doesn’t automatically pull from).
-Drop all jpeg files into Adobe Acrobat (or equivalent). Yeah, this means you have to go buy software that can create PDFs. There may be a free option.
-Use Adobe Acrobat to OCR the jpeg images. This allows Evernote to search inside the document.
-Optional: Use the optimize document’ option to reduce the size of the PDF. You can squeeze the PDF down pretty small and have it still usable.
-Drop the newly created PDF into Evernote.

Direct PDF method:
-if your scanner supports creating a PDF document just scan into the PDF format directly. -Depending on the scanner software you may be able to have it do the OCR step automatically too, otherwise you are back to needing other software to do it.

Brilliant, setting up the watch folder on Scanned Documents folder in Evernote works brilliantly on my PC.

I had been photographing meeting notes with my iPhone and uploading them, which was clunky, slow and resulted in big image sizes.

Now I just use Windows Fax & Scan, and the images appear directly in EN without further intervention. Makes a big difference.

Waiting breathlessly for your tips about doing this on a PC, Alex.

Isn’t there a way in Evernote to join different notes together ? That would not only be great for multi-page scanned documents, but also for combining related notes made with an iPhone or something alike…

Excited about this app but On MAC scanned my cards as you said everything work fine show up i EN notebook except when i search for words in the biz card I get no results? cards saved as PNGs

I’ve been trying to implement the ‘folder actions’ as described in the comments using the script that was written out. However, when I copy and paste the script into the script editor and try and save it, I receive a syntax error:

Expected expression, property or key form, etc. but found unknown token.

I’d love to get this working because the only scanner I have at work is on the network and only emails documents to me. If I could have those attachments dumped into a folder and automatically picked up by Evernote, that would be amazing.

On Mac, a workaround to get Evernote to do OCR with a multi-page pdf:

1. Use Automator to extract all pages from the pdf as images (In the PDF library it’s called Render PDF Pages as Images).

2. Drag all pages to Evernote.

3. Select all the newly created notes in Evernote and chose “Merge Notes” from the Edit menu.

You’ll probably want to include a Rename sequential action in your Automator workflow.

That is so brilliant!
Took me a while because I wasn’t ’selecting an area’ thought I could just hit ’scan’.
Thanks

Does anyone know what I can do to have scanned notes viewable on my iphone?

I am have the same problem as Aubrey- no Automatic Task’ option.

I have problems with multi-page documents – the only way to get them into Evernote is a scan to pdf if I’m right. Seems like there’s a bug in the Evernote software (Mac, Snow Leopard), there are notes first for page 1, then a note for page 1 and 2, then a note for page 1, 2 and 3 and so on. A bit annoying since the first notes are just for the rubbish bin.

But what seems to be really buggy is that quite regularly pages are missing!!! Sometimes it’s every other page, often it’s the last one. No problems when I scan to pdf to the desktop or a folder, so it’s not an issue of Image Capture.

(I’m using a Canon MX320 with document feeder, works just great!).

And yeah, Search in pdf works as well, Premium account is worth the money I’d say! I scan bloody everything these days, I keep only important certificates. Cheers, Wolfie

PS Does anybody know when ink notes will be supported? Works great on Windows but not on a Mac yet (other than that I love the Mac version much more than the Windows version).

in snow leopard, you can use the ’scan to:’ selector and click other, and find evernote in your applications folder. my scanner doesn’t have an automatic task selector.

Thanks once again Andrew and Adam for make my life so much easier, the folder action script works great for copying stacks of pages into pdf format and sending them to evernote.

As for the problem of copying sections out of a book – which as a student is a constant necessity – I came across a post that mentioned a little gem of an app called “combine pdf’s” and it works great for what I need.

I scan the section of the books that I need for tutorial and send them to my desktop, I then move them into “combine pdf’s” and they are merged together into one continuous pdf document which i drop into my “add to evernote” folder that I set up earlier with the folder action script of Andrew’s.

It works like a charm. “combine pdf’s is free to use for the first 1000 pdf’s and afterwords you have to buy a license for $30 US. A little steep I know, but if it is a function you need all of the time I think it is money well spent.

As well, my Canon MX700 works like a dream on my network since I installed Snow Leopard and makes scanning into Evernote pure genius. One less wire is always good in my books.