I’m thrilled that Evernote added the ability to store PDF files (of course I still want the ability to store arbitrary documents; I know I’m demanding but seriously it will be soooo kewl). In anycase, I used Skitch to create a screenshot in PDF format which I dragged onto the Evernote doc and wham, it got loaded. I had read that the super kewl OCR capabilities in Evernote would be applied to PDF files so of course, I sync’d a few times and tried to search for text. I was not able to find any text that I tried in the PDF. I then switched the screenshot to JPEG in Skitch and dragged that onto the doc. After sync’ing a couple of times, I was able to search into the JPEG.
I then discovered that I could search for some of the text in the PDF version of the document, and other text in the JPEG version… very strange!
Here are terms that I can find in the JPEG, but not in the PDF:
And here are terms I can find in the PDF, but not the JPEG:
To be clear, I love Evernote! It’s great, and getting better all the time… While I haven’t tried the Encryption capabilities and spotlight integration that recently made it into the Mac client, I love the new “Mixed View” mode. And the client seems more stable each time I upgrade.
Thanks for the post. Adding PDF support to Evernote was a top priority for us. Evernote doesn’t index the images within PDFs yet, but we are working on it. However, text that is found in PDFs is indexed and searchable.
Also, it was cool to find out that text added with Skitch remains as text in PDFs they create. So – that explains why you were able to find some of the words. Very impressive of Skitch to do that.
-Alex Pachikov (Evernote)
Wow, that is super kewl. I wonder where I got the idea that you guys were indexing the pictures in PDFs… I guess it was just wishful thinking! Thanks much for the follow up!
I’ve just discovered this too. The OCR is definitely getting better, but there’s still some things that just don’t get found even in JPGs.