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Posted by Andrew Sinkov at 10:13 am in Product updates

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New Premium Feature: PDF Search

July 27th, 2009

Ever since launch, our lab coat-wearing R&D team has been working those slide rules and protractors to improve Evernote’s search technology. We’re excited to unveil our new premium-only feature: PDF search.

What’s new?

There are two types of PDFs in the world: those that are searchable and those that aren’t. Most scanners produce PDFs that are essentially digitized images of a physical page. In the past, these PDFs would not appear in your search results. Starting now, Evernote will run these PDFs through our updated recognition servers, allowing our Premium subscribers to find them when they search.

In addition, our desktop versions will allow premium users to export the searchable PDFs by right clicking on them in the note.

What about old PDFs?

Over the next week, Evernote will process all existing premium user PDFs. Don’t worry, newly added PDFs will become searchable within minutes, though it may take a bit longer while our servers crunch through existing ones.

What if a PDF is already searchable?

If you already have searchable PDFs in your account, Evernote won’t touch them. This is true for all subscribers, free and premium.

What’s next?

The longer you use Evernote, the more critical our super-duper search technology becomes. Rest assured that we’re going to keep on improving it so you’ll never forget a thing.

Evernote Premium

There are lots of great reasons to go premium:

Create 500MB of new notes each month
Sync any type of file
Allow others to view and edit your notebooks
Get faster image recognition

And lots more. Check out all the benefits on our premium page.

61 Comments

Jen
August 23, 2009
12:17 pm

Am I missing something? I just upgraded to Premium, and now my PDFs are searchable within Evernote. But how do I export them from my desktop version? I have the Mac desktop version. When I choose a note and try to export, the only options I have for file format are XML and HTML. How do I export a searchable PDF so that I can copy and paste the text?

Andrew Sinkov
August 24, 2009
8:57 am

@Jen To export a searchable PDF from the Evernote desktop versions, right click on the PDF in the note and select the option to save the searchable PDF. Our philosophy is always to default to the original content that you brought into Evernote. For this reason, the main PDF that will be in your note is the same PDF that you imported, but right-clicking will allow you to export the new, searchable version.

Jon
August 25, 2009
4:42 pm

Andrew,

First, I love Evernote and have convinced/converted at least a dozen folks into the world of Evernote. Great podcasts too.

I am a premium user that upgraded primarily for the searchable PDF function. It doesn’t seem to work for handwritten notes scanned as PDF’s. Am I doing something wrong, or is this not a supported feature?

Thanks!

Andrew Sinkov
August 25, 2009
6:02 pm

@Jon The new searchable PDF feature is optimized for scanned documents containing printed text.

Wil
September 20, 2009
2:54 pm

I’m working this issue on the Evernote forum and can’t seem to get my pdf’s to become searchable. I do have a premium account. The wildcard here may be that the handwritten notes are coming from my Livescribe Pen, but I am exporting them as PDF’s within Livescribe and importing them into Evernote.

Andrew Sinkov
September 21, 2009
7:33 am

@Wil The PDF search feature is optimized for printed text–the kind that you would have if you scanned a document.

will
September 30, 2009
7:23 am

@Andrew Sinkov Is there any plan to make handwritten notes scanned in as PDFs searchable?

Andrew Sinkov
September 30, 2009
8:36 am

@Will if you are scanning in a handwritten note, my recommendation would be to scan it as an image file (JPG, PNG), this will give you the best recognition results. Some scanners allow you to create presets for different types of scans.

Drew Buell
October 7, 2009
11:02 pm

I recently upgraded to a premium account and love it. I’ve spent the last couple of days adding over 600 different pdf’s, all of which are printed-text but none of them appear to be searchable as of yet. Do I need to turn any of these features on? Or, do I simply need to wait for your servers to finish annalyzing all of the data that I’ve uploaded (I’m almost at my 500 MB limit and it’s only been a couple days)?

Ralph Elliott
October 19, 2009
6:26 am

Evernote does not seem to be OCRing my PDFs in spite of the fact that I have a Premium account. What do you suggest we do?

Andrew Sinkov
October 19, 2009
12:13 pm

@Ralph This sounds like a question for our support team: http://s.evernote.com/support

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Get the latest noteworthy news.

New Premium Feature: PDF Search

July 27th, 2009

What’s new?

What about old PDFs?

What if a PDF is already searchable?

What’s next?

Evernote Premium

61 Comments

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