Evernote Adds Yet Another New Feature

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Evernote Adds Yet Another New Feature

Posted on 29 July 2009 by Dan Cohen

Evernote, my “go to” application/service for all things notetaking, document storage, screenshot grabbing and more, pulled yet another new trick out of its bag. PDFs that are uploaded to Evernote will now be searchable thanks to the company’s powerful OCR technology!

As someone who has uploaded a huge number of PDFs to Evernote I’m really happy to see this feature added. Each new implementation may only be a relatively small, incremental step but, taken as a whole, the service just gets better and better at a pretty rapid pace.

There was one thing about both the announcement and the demonstration video (embedded after the jump) that was especially striking to me….

In rolling out this new searchable PDF feature the company made clear that they want everybody who uses the service to become a premium user. In the announcement they mention “premium user” three times (the whole e-mail was just two paragraphs long) and in the video it is abundantly clear… “become a premium user”.

Having already seen a number of web-based services go under over the last year or two I for one am glad they’re pushing the premium membership. Evernote has the potential to be the ubiquitous notetaking service for anyone who is Internet connected but that can only happen if the company is able to continue to grow and evolve. And with premium service being under $50 a year… why wouldn’t you become one?

With Evernote’s Premium service you get…

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

This post was written by:

Dan Cohen - who has written 2791 posts on Gear Diary.

Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. +Dan Cohen

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ritchie70
But is it OCR, or is it just searching in text-based PDFs?
A PDF is really just a file full of Postscript at heart. That Postscript can contain ASCII text (or maybe Unicode, but you get the idea) and font descriptions, or it can contain a graphical description of each mark on the page.
As an example of the two types of PDF:
1. I get Dr. Dobb’s Journal as a PDF. It’s got the text in it as text.
2. The copier at work can scan to a PDF and put the file on a network share. It’s just putting in descriptions of every mark it saw on the page, including lint, toner marks from when it was printed, folds in the paper, etc.
It really isn’t a very clever trick to be able to search the former, but to do that latter, you have to render the letters then perform OCR, which is a much cooler thing.
stevenshytle
The lack of a native ap for my windows mobile device and a proprietary file format for the files that are on my pc keep it from being used as more than a capture and go on my phone only tool. Until I can integrate the data into the home pc, work pc, and pocketpc natively, it will have to stay that way. I am hopeful though.
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Dan Cohen
stevenshytle– there is a native app
ihttp://www.evernote.com/about/download/
have not used it but it is there
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