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getting text from book into a notetaking app
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Posted by WSP
Sep 15, 2013 at 03:12 PM
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
Posted by dan7000
Sep 16, 2013 at 02:45 AM
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?
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 16, 2013 at 11:46 AM
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).
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.
Posted by WSP
Sep 16, 2013 at 12:01 PM
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