Hi all ...

I was very interested in a post that WSP made in the AskSam thread ... just will paste in what he said here ...

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Most importantly--to me--Evernote does a quick, competent OCR of any text in images. As a result, I do far less typing that I used to at the note-taking stage. When I am reading a printed book or periodical (I'm not talking about digital versions here) and I come upon a passage that interests me, I photograph the page with my iPhone and pop it into Evernote. Within a few minutes the text in that image becomes fully searchable. Much nicer than typing!

It's possible, incidentally, to take the picture with the "Page" camera option in Evernote (iOS versions), but I prefer to use an iPhone app called CamScanner, because its excellent "Magic Color" enhances the image so nicely. CamScanner then allows me to send the photo (or photos) directly to Evernote if I wish. Earlier this evening, just as an experiment, I photographed a page of a book I was reading--in the living room, under not especially good light--that was published in 1722. I sent it to Evernote via CamScanner, all quite effortlessly, and the image was then easily searchable in EN. If I wished, I could crop the image further in Skitch (from within EN), highlight certain sentences, and put various marks in the margin.

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I just looked and I see that there is a CamScanner app for Android, so I will be sure to try this.

The thing about taking photos of text in a book is - there is a lot of skew in the image. This is because of the angle at which you take the picture of the printed page, and also because of the curvature of the page as it goes into the spine of the book.

So far I have been working with Omnipage OCR. It does have a "3D Deskew" function that does a pretty good job of de-skewing the image for OCR purposes.

When I scan a document into Paperport, I save it to the "Searchable Image" PDF format. I always want to be able to see the original image, because of the inevitable text recognition errors. It's been a while since I've tried, but so far I didn't find a way to get Omnipage to save a scanned document so that I could see the original image of the text cropped (to show only the page image) and deskewed.- essentially I would see the same kind of page image that I would see if I took the page out of the book, scanned with a sheet-fed scanner, and saved it to Searchable Image PDF. That would be my goal anyway.

would be interested in hearing others' experience - I am encouraged by Bill's info.

jim

Jim,

What I failed to mention is that CamScanner automatically compensates for skew. There are a number of apps similar to CamScanner (I used JotNot, for example, for several months last year), and they're all reasonably good. The reason I finally settled on CamScanner is that its image enhancement seemed to me the best.

I should also emphasize that I use Evernote's OCR for text recognition in images. Several of these phone scanner apps try to do OCR on their own, but they're not very good at it. If I am producing a PDF file rather a single image in CanScammer, I afterwards run that file through PDF-Xchange on my computer in order to do OCR on it.

If I were not sending images into Evernote, I would be tempted to use the app called TextGrabber (by ABBYY) on my phone. It does fairly good text recognition, though it seems to be fussy about light and camera angle.

Bill

I do quite a bit of this too. I previously used a 3d party app to do the de-skewing but now I find that Evernote's page scanner does a decent enough job and it makes the process super fast. For instance, I occasionally have to use paper library books for research and I just quickly photograph the pages I care about and when I get back to my desk they are sitting there in Evernote in Windows waiting for me - it's awesome.

But one other method I use a lot is screenshots from Kindle or Google Reader. Generally if there's a book I will want to copy a lot of stuff from, I get the Kindle / eBook version. Then when I find a page I want to copy, I do a screenshot on my iPad (or on my Android tablet I used to have a 3d party app for this). Then paste into Evernote. You get a cleaner, easier-to-read version of the page than you do with a photo or scan. Unfortunately, it's slightly slower than a photo because you have to copy, switch apps, new note, insert picture. And you don't get an accurate page number with Kindle. Believe it or not, I often have both the paper book and the Kindle book, and I note the real page number in the Evernote note after inserting the Kindle screenshot.

I just did a quick little experiment. I photographed the same page (an old book, poorly printed) in Evernote's Page Camera and in CamScanner; then I allowed Evernote enough time to recognize the text in the two images. When I did a series of word searches, I found the recognition was somewhat more accurate in the CamScanner page; in other words, I searched for quite a few words, and in several instances I was able to find those particular words on the CamScanner page and not on the Page Camera page.

The differences were not dramatic, and I agree with you that Page Camera is really quick and easy to use, but this seems to confirm my earlier subjective impression that CamScanner produces somewhat better search results. Of course if I had been photographing a more crisply printed book in better light, the differences between the two images might have disappeared.

Bill

dan7000 wrote:

Then when I find a page I want
to copy, I do a screenshot on my iPad (or on my Android tablet I used to
have a 3d party app for this).

May I ask what that 3rd party Android app was?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

dan7000 wrote:
>Then when I find a page I want
>to copy, I do a screenshot on my iPad (or on my Android tablet I used
to
>have a 3d party app for this).

May I ask what that 3rd party Android app was?

Alexander,

Apparently I misremembered. It was actually on my old iPhone that I used a 3rd party app: JotNot Scanner Pro. I did not have a third party app for doing this with Android; apparently I just used the camera on the Android tablet.

some recent news pertinent to the topic:

Fujitsu Develops Technology to Correct Curvature in Scanned Images of Book Pages

Overhead scanner captures images of open books or magazines, reproduces a distortion-free image as if scanned from a flat document

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2013/20130710-03.html

Just out of curiosity, what is the average cost of a solution like this? I'm asking because it sounds pretty expensive. You've got the cost of the iPhone itself, plus the monthly service charges, the application licenses (if any), and I guess you'd have to add something to reflect the cost of the computer and so on.

I'm just wondering because I like the idea of being able to photograph research documents, but I'd have to basically get everything except the laptop in order to set this up. So far I've held the line against getting a smartphone, for instance. They seem incredibly expensive, especially with all the service charges, and I don't really need one to begin with.

I was thinking I might be able to do the same kind of thing with a digital camera rather than a smartphone, but I've tried taking pictures of maps and documents with my camera and getting them in focus was a real problem. Can you really take a clear, focused picture of an entire page of a document with a smartphone?

Gary Carson wrote:

I'm just wondering because I like the idea of being able to photograph
research documents, but I'd have to basically get everything except the
laptop in order to set this up. So far I've held the line against
getting a smartphone, for instance. They seem incredibly expensive,
especially with all the service charges, and I don't really need one to
begin with.

With iOS at least there is the option to get an iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the phone. No service charges etc.

But I'm personally skeptical about how effective this sort of notetaking would be in the case of extensive research, taking hundreds of notes from each book on an ongoing basis. E.g. One usually just wants a certain passage, not the text of an entire page. For this reason I'm sticking with dictating quotes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and pasting them directly into the desired software (Freeplane for me initially), as it seems generally quicker. But I can see that the photographic option could be convenient for occasional notetaking.

I use dictation as well (with a voice recorder), but I stopped using Dragon to transcribe my research notes because it has a hard time with unusual names, place names, certain technical terms, etc., especially when I don't know how to pronounce them in the first place. I tried using the Dragon's spell command, but the results were erratic at best with a voice recorder. Also, I don't want to mess around with correcting recognition errors and so on.

I'm still using dictation, but I found an easier method that eliminates the need to transcribe anything. I use a relatively cheap Sony AX412 notetaking MP3 recorder to record my research notes, then I import the recordings into Audio Notetaker. The imports are really simple. I just connect the recorder to my laptop with a USB cable and Audio Notetaker recognizes the device and all of its files. I can then select the files to import and click the import button and it's done. Audio Notetaker will create separate sections for each file and it will also break each recording into separate sections every time it encounters an index mark. It doesn't recognize the index marks created by all recorders, but the AX412 works fine.

The process is very simple. Once the recordings have been imported into Audio Notetaker, I can use its controls to jump around in the files and annotate them (or transcribe them manually). Audio Notetaker is a fantastic application for this. You can take notes from a recording, stop and start the playback and jump forward or backward in the file just using keyboard shortcuts. For instance, you can skip from the beginning of a file to the middle or the end and then back again using the arrow keys. You can also highlight important sections of the recording, delete sections, split and merge files, etc. It works really well.

One nice thing about using Audio Notetaker is that I can spell out unusual terms while I'm taking notes and just type the words out while I'm annotating the recording. And there's no need to dictate punctuation. The text notes can then be exported as a text file or in HTML format. Very nice application.

Dr Andus wrote:

Gary Carson wrote:

With iOS at least there is the option to get an iPod Touch, which is an
iPhone without the phone. No service charges etc.

When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or iPhone 4.

But I'm personally skeptical about how effective this sort of notetaking
would be in the case of extensive research, taking hundreds of notes
from each book on an ongoing basis. E.g. One usually just wants a
certain passage, not the text of an entire page.

Phone pictures works even better for a short passage because you can zoom in and you don't have to get the whole page, which makes the resulting note easier to read and the OCR better. I type a lot faster than I talk, so if I'm going to copy a short passage from a book I'll just type it.

dan7000 wrote:

When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was
pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or
iPhone 4.

Was that a 4th gen. or 5th gen. iPod Touch? Just wondering if 5th gen. is any better.

Phone pictures works even better for a short passage because you can
zoom in and you don't have to get the whole page, which makes the
resulting note easier to read and the OCR better. I type a lot faster
than I talk, so if I'm going to copy a short passage from a book I'll
just type it.

I guess I should have made it clear that when I dictate a passage in Dragon, I immediately put it into a note in Freeplane, where I organise my notes into a hierarchical outline (mind map), effectively reverse-outlining the argument of the book I'm reading (this is for heavy-going academic books, where seeing the overall outline of the argument--and where the quotes are coming from--helps comprehension).

So my focus is on immediate processing of the notes (rather than taking a lot of notes first and then processing them), which would be disrupted if I had to introduce an additonal step of uploading photos, OCR-ing them, and copying and pasting text into Freeplane.

From Freeplane I'd export the outline with notes into Bonsai, where I'd analyse it further, and then I'd import it as RTF into ConnectedText for storage.

I have no problem getting sharp pictures with my iPhone, though it helps to use an app with an anti-shake option.

As I said earlier, I move my photos into Evernote, which has a supplementary program called Skitch. With Skitch I can crop and mark key passages quickly and efficiently -- and there's no need to leave Evernote while I do this.

As for the cost of a mobile phone, you'll have to make your own decision about that. I bought mine for other purposes and then was delighted to discover that it also worked very nicely for note-taking.

Bill

Gary Carson wrote:

I was thinking I might be able to do the same kind of thing with a
digital camera rather than a smartphone, but I've tried taking pictures
of maps and documents with my camera and getting them in focus was a
real problem. Can you really take a clear, focused picture of an entire
page of a document with a smartphone?

I expect that a contemporary autofocus camera with anti-shake should be just as good as most smartphones for taking the actual picture; depending on the size/distance of the text, you may also want to use the macro option. I have a relatively cheap Panasonic Lumix of 2-3 years back and I have found it very effective for occasional document 'scanning' on the road. I just found this article with some interesting tips: http://diyivorytower.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/use-your-point-and-shoot-digital-camera-as-document-scanner/

That said, the main advantage of Smartphones is the integration of the various programs that do the anti-distortion and OCR work, not to mention the direct network syncing with Dropbox, Evernote or what have you, saving you from fiddling with SDs or USB cables whenever you photograph a document for immediate use. A camera solution for the latter might be this: http://www.eye.fi/

As for OCRing the image itself, there used to be a dedicated product by ABBYY, Fotoreader, but this seems to have been deprecated and is no longer available for download/purchase from their site. I suspect that its functionality has been integrated in their main product Finereader Pro.

You don't really need to treat OCR as a separate task nowadays.
For example:
(a) If you have any image containing text and save it into OneNote, or clip any image or part-image containing text, into OneNote, then OneNote immediately and automatically OCRs it, and very accurately too. The text becomes copyable and searchable.

(b) Any such text in an image in OneNote is indexed by OneNote *and* by Windows Search, so is readily found from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search.

(c) If you save any image containing text as a TIF file to disk, then Windows Desktop Search/Index will automatically OCR and index the text in the image. The text is readily found from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search.

I used to use the ABBYY products, for OCR capture of text in images, but now no longer require to.
ABBY tools have thus arguably become obsolete, or at least partially so.

Not only images but words/phrases in sound files can be identified and indexed by OneNote. This can be very handy if you have recorded a meeting or (say) a radio interview to a sound file. All you need to do is save the sound file to OneNote, and it will be scanned quite rapidly in the background. Searches will later show the word or phrase you are looking for and the time into the recording when that word/phrase occurs.
Audio phrases in audio recordings saved into OneNote are readily found via Windows Desktop Search/Index from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search, or via OneNote search.

Yes, both Evernote and OneNote can recognize text in images, and that's a strong argument for using either of them. I think this is an indispensable element in a good note-taking program. Of course there are other ways of moving printed text into a note -- and I've tried most of them -- but they are usually time-consuming and awkward.

In my research I also make heavy use of material in historic newspapers, many of which are available online as digital images. I just clip and pop the articles into Evernote, where they become almost instantly searchable. I'm aware that the same nice little trick can be done in OneNote.

Bill

Dr Andus wrote:

dan7000 wrote:
>When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was
>pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or
>iPhone 4.

Was that a 4th gen. or 5th gen. iPod Touch? Just wondering if 5th gen.
is any better.

I'm not sure. It was the first version of the iPod Touch but I'm not sure what they numbered it. I got it new in 2008. My iPhone 3 also took terrible pictures though. I have a 4s now and there is a huge difference in quality. My iPad Mini takes even better pictures of pages, and my Samsung Galaxy Tab also is very good.

I guess I should have made it clear that when I dictate a passage in
Dragon, I immediately put it into a note in Freeplane, where I organise
my notes into a hierarchical outline (mind map), effectively
reverse-outlining the argument of the book I'm reading (this is for
heavy-going academic books, where seeing the overall outline of the
argument--and where the quotes are coming from--helps comprehension).

So my focus is on immediate processing of the notes (rather than taking
a lot of notes first and then processing them), which would be disrupted
if I had to introduce an additonal step of uploading photos, OCR-ing
them, and copying and pasting text into Freeplane.

Slightly OT but I've often wondered if an "analyze as you research" method would be better than my usual workflow. I usually do a bunch of research where I just dump tons of relevant quotes with citations into Evernote, then after I've got all that in EN and, to an extent, in my brain, I create an outline (currently in Workflowy). Then I start drafting in Word, pulling cites from Evernote, and I quickly see where the holes in my research are. So I go back to do more research, again just dumping everything relevant into EN - then back to Workflowy to refine the outline, then back to word. It's an iterative cycle like that until I have a first draft and after that I pretty much stick to word even if I need to fill in a little extra research.
I've considered whether I'd be better doing the outlining at the same time as the research, but I feel like it would slow me down and maybe confine my research. But the flip side of confining the research is that it would be more targeted - i.e., you probably focus your research on each point in the outline sequentially so you don't have holes in your research when you start drafting like I do. But do you find that doing all that analysis while researching slows down the research phase?

dan7000 wrote:

Slightly OT but I've often wondered if an "analyze as you research"
method would be better than my usual workflow.

It probably depends on what sort of research one is doing. As here we are talking about reading hard copy books, I've settled on this workflow because I realised that I have the best understanding of a book while I'm reading it and that is when I can take the most sensible notes. If I do the analysis later, I find that I had forgotten the argument, or misinterpret things more easily.

But it is also part of my strategy to only read books that really matter to my research and read them as carefully as possible, so that I won't have to read them again and be able to rely on my notes. Also, if I read a book, I want to make sure I can build its argument into whatever I am writing, so there is a very short lead time between reading the book and writing something about it. But there are two separate resulting outlines: one is the reverse outline of the book's arguments, the other is the outline for the piece I'm writing.

My process with electronic books and articles is similar, except that there is no need to use Dragon to dictate quotes and comments, usually copy and paste works fine (in fact I turn PDFs into Word with AABBYY FineReader to remove line breaks).

@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.

I agree that OneNote's text-extraction capabilities are superior to those of Evernote, and in general I admire OneNote very much. I used an earlier version of it for about a year. I think my main misgiving about the program was that everything seemed to be tied so closely into other Microsoft products; since I have always scrupulously avoided Word, that didn't feel like an advantage to me. Still, I'm glad to hear your enthusiastic report.

Bill

@Dr Andus: Where you say "My process with electronic books and articles is similar, except that there is no need to use Dragon to dictate quotes and comments, usually copy and paste works fine (in fact I turn PDFs into Word with AABBYY FineReader to remove line breaks)", I would be interested to know whether and how you have used Qiqqa (reference management) or Calibre (book management) for this type of work and what the outcome was.

Slartibartfarst wrote:

I would be
interested to know whether and how you have used Qiqqa (reference
management) or Calibre (book management) for this type of work and what
the outcome was.

Have tried Qiqqa beta some years ago. I was impressed with it but it didn't appear to be helpful with my existing 1000+ library of PDFs. Haven't heard of Calibre before. Do you any specific suggestions about these two software? I'd be interested to hear it.

@WSP:
"I agree that OneNote’s text-extraction capabilities are superior to those of Evernote, and in general I admire OneNote very much. I used an earlier version of it for about a year. I think my main misgiving about the program was that everything seemed to be tied so closely into other Microsoft products; since I have always scrupulously avoided Word, that didn’t feel like an advantage to me. Still, I’m glad to hear your enthusiastic report."
=======================================
I am usually one to criticise MS, but since about 2007 I have been greatly impressed by the way they effectively stitched up the market by integrating ALL MS Office products AND Internet Explorer, with SharePoint. Now InfoPath is a significantly useful tool in that integration.

One of the successes of OneNote would seem to be the apparently smooth OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) of other applications' documents - and particularly those documents from the MS Office suite. You have to try it out to appreciate how well it works. It is redolent of Ashton-Tate's Framework V, but not as good IMO.
You can also print to Onenote from other applications (OneNote is a printer!), where the printout takes the form of images output into the Notebook - whose embedded text is promptly OCRed and indexed and available for extraction/copying!
By using this printout method as a standard lowest common denominator, none of the typical constipated document conversion is required...

Now, if all of the above is coupled with the given that the lowest entry price to the MS Office Professional Plus suite can be as low as US$9.95 (refer "Want Microsoft Office? $9.95 Could Get You A Copy" - http://www.worldstart.com/want-microsoft-office-9-95-could-get-you-a-copy/ ), then one's previous reservations about MS Office might well evaporate like an early morning mist.
Well, mine did, anyway.

@Dr Andus:
"Have tried Qiqqa beta some years ago. I was impressed with it but it didn’t appear to be helpful with my existing 1000+ library of PDFs. Haven’t heard of Calibre before. Do you any specific suggestions about these two software? I’d be interested to hear it."
=======================
Please see the reviews and discussion threads here:
Calibre - e-Book (Personal Library/Document) Management - Mini-Review - http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=29691.0
Calibre - e-Book (Personal Library/Document) Management - Mini-Review - http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=29691.0

Sorry, the second link should have been: Qiqqa - Reference Management System - Mini-Review - http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34220.0
(We are not enabled to edit a post once it has been made - is that right?)