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One common comment about Evernote is that the service is awesome, but people wish that it supported encryption of notes or notebooks. To address this, Evernote introduced the ability to encrypt text inside a note, but for those that want something a bit more comprehensive, here is a 2 part guide on how to encrypt Evernote.

Today we’ll look at Microsoft Windows, and tomorrow how to encrypt Evernote on Mac OSX.

Encrypting Text Inside A Note

The “official” way to do encryption in Evernote is to simply encrypt any sensitive text in a note. This is easily done in the Evernote UI

Step 1: Select the text you want to Encrypt.

Step 2: Right-click and choose Encrypt Selected Text.

Step 3: Make up a passphrase that you will later use to decrypt this text. Note: This phrase is never sent to Evernote’s servers, and they have no way of retrieving it for you. If you forget it, you are out of luck. Also, this text can not be decrypted in mobile or web Evernote – just in the Windows client.

Step 4: Your text will now show as encrypted in Evernote. To decrypt it, click it and enter your passphrase from Step 3.

Encrypting Your Evernote Database

OK, it’s time to get a little geeky. Evernote itself does not support database encryption, so we are going to use a free program called TrueCrypt to make an encrypted drive that Windows will treat like any other drive or USB key. The difference is, whatever you save to it will be encrypted.
We’re then going to tell Evernote to put our files in there instead of the C: drive.
Ready? Let’s do it!
Note: This involves moving your Evernote files. If you’re not comfortable with that, I recommend you do not proceed. I’m not responsible in the unlikely event that your Evernote files are lost or something.
Step 1: Download and install TrueCrypt. Go to http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads and download the latest Windows version. Save it to your hard drive and install it.
Step 2: Start up TrueCrypt. You’ll see a blank list of drive letters. Click Create Volume.

Step 3: Hit Next for Create an Encrypted File Container and Next for Standard TrueCrypt Volume.
Step 4: Hit Select File and choose where on your hard drive you want your TrueCrypt image to be saved. You can think of it as a container that you are going to put other files into. For simplicity, I will put it on the Desktop and call it EvernoteVolume.

After hitting Save, hit Next when you are back at the Wizard.
Step 5: Choose the type of encryption you want. If you’re not sure, the default should be fine. Just hit Next
Step 6: Enter the size you want your new TrueCrypt drive to be. Obviously you will want to make this somewhat bigger than your existing Evernote database to allow for growth. To find out what your existing database size is, go to Tools and then Options in Evernote and then hit Open Database Folder.
Mine is about 77 Megs so I will put 150 Megs for my TrueCrypt volume. Why not. Hit Next.

Step 7: Enter a volume password that will be used when you mount this drive. It doesn’t make sense to go to all this trouble of encrypting Evernote and then choosing a weak password, so choose a good one. Hit Next.
Step 8: If you know that you need to change the Volume Format, do so here. Otherwise try the defaults.
Step 9: Hit OK and then Exit. You’ve got a TrueCrypt volume! Yeah!!
Step 10: Go back to your main TrueCrypt window where all the drive letters are. Pick which drive letter you will want to use. For this example I will use N, but use what you want.
Step 11: Click Select File and navigate to the file you specified back in Step 4.

Step 12: Hit Mount and enter the password that you created in Step 7.
Step 13: Check your Windows Explorer. You now have a new drive! Yeah!

Step 14: At long last, go into Evernote and got to Tools and then Options. Click Change to change the location of your Evernote files.
Step 15: Navigate to your N drive, or whatever drive letter you chose in Step 10. Hit OK. Evernote will now move all of its files to your new, encrypted drive.

You’re done! Awesome job!
One thing to note about this – from this point forward, you will need to have your TrueCrypt drive mounted before you start Evernote – otherwise Evernote won’t be able to find its files!
Over at 40Tech they have a handy TrueCrypt/Evernote batch file that might make this easier for you. I have not tried it myself, but give it a go if you’d like.
Do you have any other tips for encrypting your Evernote files? Leave them in the comments.

As you may know, when I want to OCR a bunch of PDFs at once as part of my scanning workflow, I use an Applescript droplet to have Adobe Acrobat OCR the files.

The other day I came across this blog post from Jonathan Bowman over at Adobe. He shows how to use a feature of Acrobat that I didn’t notice before: Batch Processing.

He has screenshots showing how it works, but I thought I would put together this video that shows how I set it up.

The nice thing about it is the process is pretty much the same whether you use Mac or PC.

By the way, there are a ton of things you can use Batch Processing for, not just making PDFs searchable. I will definitely be poking around in there.

Do you use Acrobat Batch Processing for anything?

Update: It now looks like the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M are now on Amazon!

As you may have seen, Fujitsu posted a press release yesterday saying that the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (for PC) and ScanSnap S1500M (for Mac) are now released.

My main question was – will they be cross-platform like most USB devices? In this ScanSnap 1500M post, commenter rei said that he was told that they in fact would be.

I have just confirmed with Fujitsu that yes, rei is right. You will be able to plug the ScanSnap S1500M into a Windows machine and vice versa (as long as you install the correct software). This is tremendous! No more Windows to Mac (or vice versa) workarounds!

This feature alone makes the S1500 models a big improvement. Here are a few more details that Fujitsu shared with me:

• ScanSnap Manager comes in two flavors, the Windows version (ScanSnap Manager V5.0) and the Mac version (ScanSnap Manager V3.0)
• There is a Windows setup disk that comes with the S1500 and a Mac setup disk that comes with the S1500M, but each comes with both versions on the DVD (!)
• When the Setup Disk is installed, Setup detects PC or Mac and displays the appropriate installer for that platform.
• Aside from ScanSnap Manager, the Setup only contains the specific applications for the model detected.
• No, it doesn’t come with both the Windows and Mac versions of Acrobat. Acrobat comes on a separate CD.

If you go to the Fujitsu US store, you can actually see the S1500M there. However, it doesn’t appear to be on Amazon or other similar sites yet and I am told that if you do order it there, it will be back-ordered. Apparently it should start hitting stores around March 20. I’ll re-post when I see it available.

As mentioned, the biggest headache of previous ScanSnaps (and there weren’t many) was the fact that they were not cross-platform. This addresses that.

This was referenced in my ScanSnap workflow series, but I thought I would provide it in its own article as well.

I have a ScanSnap S300M and Adobe Acrobat, and was getting pretty tired of sitting there OCRing the PDFs manually in Acrobat.

I came across this article by MacWorld which had a great Applescript Folder Action that would kick off Acrobat’s OCR whenever a PDF was dropped into the folder.

It worked well but I found that then I had to sit there and watch the OCR go after each document, and it seemed to have problems if I scanned another file while the OCR was still going.

I wanted a solution where I could just throw a bunch of PDFs at Acrobat and walk away.

Thanks to this thread on MacScripter, I turned the Macworld script into a droplet. Now I just go through and scan a bunch of PDFs to a folder, then drag the files onto the droplet, and go to bed. Acrobat OCRs each one one by one.

Here is the script. You can download it for free, but make sure you go to the Macworld article because it is 90% his work.

OCRIt-Acrobat – Droplet to batch OCR PDFs in Adobe Acrobat

To use it:

• Download and uncompress the file and save it to your Desktop, Dock or wherever
• Drag one or more PDFs onto the icon
• Enjoy

Update: User nodis in the comments pointed out a great optimization that makes significantly smaller PDFs. Thanks!

Here is the source code:

property mytitle : "ocrIt-Acrobat" -- Modified from a script created by Macworld http://www.macworld.com/article/60229/2007/10/nov07geekfactor.html

-- I am called when the user open the script with a double click
on run
tell me
activate
display dialog "I am an AppleScript droplet." & return & return & "Please drop a bunch of PDF files onto my icon to batch OCR them." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title mytitle with icon note
end tell
end run

-- I am called when the user drops Finder items onto the script icon
-- Timeout of 36000 seconds to allow for OCRing really big documents
on open droppeditems
with timeout of 36000 seconds
try
repeat with droppeditem in droppeditems
set the item_info to info for droppeditem
tell application "Adobe Acrobat Professional"
activate
open droppeditem
end tell
tell application "System Events"

tell application process “Acrobat”

click the menu item “Recognize Text Using OCR…” of menu 1 of menu item “OCR Text Recognition” of the menu “Document” of menu bar 1
try
click radio button “All pages” of group 1 of group 2 of group 1 of window “Recognize Text”
end try
click button “OK” of window “Recognize Text”

end tell

end tell
tell application “Adobe Acrobat Professional”
save the front document with linearize
close the front document
end tell
end repeat
– catching unexpected errors
on error errmsg number errnum
my dsperrmsg(errmsg, errnum)
end try
end timeout
end open

-- I am displaying error messages
on dsperrmsg(errmsg, errnum)
tell me
activate
display dialog "Sorry, an error occured:" & return & return & errmsg & " (" & errnum & ")" buttons {"Never mind"} default button 1 with icon stop with title mytitle
end tell
end dsperrmsg


Update 2: If you use Acrobat X, please see this post about OCR AppleScript for Acrobat X.

Update: This post is now slightly out of date as I now use the ScanSnap S1300. You may want to sign up for my free 7 part e-Course while will more comprehensively take you through the steps to go paperless.
This is Part 2 of the My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow series. Make sure to check out Part 1 – ScanSnap Settings.

Now that we have set up ScanSnap Manager with my four profiles, here is what I do with the files.

At first I started using DevonThink Pro Office, but I found that it was a little overkill for my needs. If I had a huge amount of documents that I needed regular access to it would be perfect, but for my home needs I wanted to go with something a little more lightweight.

One main drawback (maybe the only one) is that my ScanSnap S300M did not come with any OCR software in the box. I could download a form to have ReadIris Pro 11 mailed to me, but that didn’t help me at first.

Luckily, I had Adobe Acrobat Professional already, so I decided to use that for my ScanSnap workflow. If you have the ScanSnap S1500 or S1500M, your scanner will come with Acrobat already.

Really Boring, Really Fast

Excited to start OCR’ing up a storm, I set ScanSnap Manager to output to Acrobat and away I went.

It worked quite well. I would hit the button, it would open the resulting file in Acrobat, and then I would go Document | OCR Text Recognition | Recognize Text Using OCR and follow the resulting menus.

I think this would be OK normally, but since I had a ton of things to scan from my file cabinet, this got really boring, really fast to have to sit there and manually OCR every document over and over again. I knew there had to be a better way.

Applescript To The Rescue

I am a complete AppleScript newbie, but I found this great post from Macworld where the author made an AppleScript Folder Action that would watch a certain folder, and when a document got put in it, it would kick off Acrobat (or ReadIris Pro) and OCR it automatically.

I set ScanSnap Manager to save to a folder called ToProcess and gave that folder a Folder Action to run the MacWorld script.

This worked quite well, and would possibly work OK on an ongoing basis, but again I ran into problems when doing my massive scan-a-thon – if i dropped a document in to the folder while the other Acrobat session was still OCR’ing, it would give error messages.

Droplets Are Fun

The solution I came up with was to change the script so that it became a droplet. To do this I ripped off part of the script referenced in this thread.

A droplet is just an Application that you save somewhere (I have it on my Dock). You run it by dragging a file onto its icon.

Here is the script that I cobbled together . Feel free to download and use as you please.

OCRit – Droplet to kick batch OCR PDFs using Adobe Acrobat

Final Workflow

So now, I have the following workflow:

• Scan document using the ScanSnap, ScanSnap Manager saves the file in the ToProcess folder
• When I am done my batch, I drag the PDF files onto the OCRIt icon, which kicks of Adobe Acrobat Professional and tells it to recognize the text in the document
• When that is done, process/move the files as needed

It is working quite well for you, but I guess if I wanted to avoid all this I could have just stuck with DevonThink as it has built in OCR. What is your workflow? How do you handle the Optical Character Recognition part?

Update: This post is now slightly out of date as I now use the ScanSnap S1300. You may want to sign up for my free 7 part e-Course while will more comprehensively take you through the steps to go paperless.

This is Part 1 of the My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow series.  Make sure to check out Part 2 – ScanSnap Post-Scan Processing.

I recently moved and have taken the opportunity to do a massive scan-and-purge-a-thon. Almost every piece of paper from my filing cabinet, and every piece of paper that comes into the house gets fed to my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M and, if appropriate, shredded.

After 2060 sheets scanned so far, I’ve settled on a workflow and some settings, so I thought I would post it here. While they’re for my S300M they should apply for any model.

Profiles

I have four profiles set up in ScanSnap Manager. A profile is basically a collection of settings that you want to use, normally associated with the type of paper that you are scanning.

To create a new profile, go to ScanSnap Manager | Settings, click in the “Select A Profile” dropdown box, and choose Add Profile.

The four profiles I have set up are:

• Standard – Double sided pages, all in one PDF
• Stack Of Double – Double sided pages, one PDF per sheet
• Stack of Single – Single sided pages, one PDF per sheet
• Single All In One – Single sided pages, all in one PDF

Common Settings

There are some settings I have that are common to all 4 profiles:

Application Tab

I have all my profiles set to just scan to a file instead of an application. I will touch on that more in a bit.

Save Tab

The files get saved to a ToProcess folder with the standard filename.

Scanning Tab

To slightly increase the quality without compromising on speed too much, I have Image Quality set to “Better”, with Auto Color Detection.

In addition to the common settings, I have some settings set specifically for each profile

Standard Profile

On the Scanning tab, I have it set to Duplex Scan so that it scans both sides. On the File Option tab, I clicked the Option button and chose “Multipage PDF”. This puts everything in the batch in one PDF file instead of splitting it up.

I also have “Continue scanning after current scan is finished” checked. This is because sometimes I will have large stacks that I want put in one file, but the stack is larger than the ScanSnap 300M can take in one run. By checking this, it will wait and keep adding to the same file after each scan (until I hit Finished).

Stack Of Double Profile

The Stack of Double profile is handy when I have a stack of double sided pages, but i want each page in a separate file. It uses Duplex scanning like in the Standard Profile with two differences:

• I have “Continue scanning after current scan is finished” unchecked on the Scanning tab
• In File Options | Options, I have it set to Generate one PDF file per 2 pages.

Stack of Single Profile

The Stack of Single profile is the same as the Stack of Double, except I have Scanning Side set to Simplex (Single Sided) on the sca nning tab, and “Generate one PDF file per 1 page” set on the File Option | Options screen.

Single All In One Profile

The Single All In One profile has Simplex and “Continue Scanning” set on the Scanning tab and Multipage PDF set in File Options | Options.

Why bother with a Single All In One profile when the ScanSnap removes blank pages? The ScanSnap is great at removing blank pages, but sometimes documents have markings or heavy creases on the back, and the ScanSnap doesn’t pick those up as blanks. Having a Single All In One profile saves me from deleting pages later.

Next time I will cover using OCR software and document management software to actually do something with these newly minted PDFs.

Do you have any other profiles or workflows that you use? Let us know in the comments.