getting text from book into a notetaking app

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 16, 2013 at 11:47 AM

@WSP: In making a comparison as you did, where you say “both Evernote and OneNote can recognize text in images”, one needs to bear in mind that:
(a) Google docs and MS SkyDrive also “OCR - recognize” text in images.
(b) The text thus recognized is not copyable, but only searchable.
(c) These cloud-based services are of no use to you if you are offline from the internet.
(d) The Evernote local client application is deliberately constrained and does not offer this service, presumably so as not to compete with its cloud-based version.
(e) MS OneNote in the 2017 and 2013 versions is a client-based application and offers not only OCR - recognition and searchability in the manner described in my post above, but also text extraction (copyable text) from those images.
(f) MS OneNote Notebooks are integrated with SkyDrive and can be synced via the cloud for online access/use (e.g., including by MS Office 365 users) and to other devices AND/OR users.

In this regard, OneNote would seem to currently be uniquely more useful than other cloud-based or client-based applications/services. One of its leading edges is in automating the OCRing of text embedded in images AND making that text available for immediate extraction/copying.
In terms of “getting text from book into a notetaking app”, the advantages are thus obvious and could include, for example, greater efficiency, more functionality, absence of dependency/lock-in, greater possibility for collaborative working, more ubiquitous access, etc.

Having said that, I am still cautiously trialling OneNote in 2013 version (have been trialling OneNote since MS Office 2007 version was released) and have decided to hold off migrating all my existing PIM material to OneNote, focussing instead on discovering and understanding how to make best use of OneNote’s new/different functionality - including using imaging/OCR and using audio recordings (both as discussed above), and using OneNote’s rather interesting wiki-like hyperlinking that links to other OneNote Notebooks, local document/image files, networked files and cloud-based files/services.
The linking to local document/image files is not to be sniffed at, given the aforementioned functionality of the Windows Desktop Search/Index to OCR TIF files - which could be multi-part documents.