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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?

In the past I have posted about how to use Japanese ScanSnap drivers, and have posted that the new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M will be cross-platform, but what if you don’t want to mess around with foreign drivers or have an older ScanSnap scanner?

if you have access to a Windows XP CD, there is a free way that you can use your ScanSnap S510 or S300 on your Mac using VirtualBox. (This may even work with Linux too – I’ve never tried).

VirtualBox is a free open source program that will let you run Windows on your Mac. There’s no rebooting required like Boot Camp – you run Windows inside a window in your Mac. This is great not only for the ScanSnap but for any Windows program you may be stuck using.

There are two requirements to do this:

1. You need to have an Intel mac. No Powerbooks or Powermacs, sorry.
2. You need to have access to a Windows XP installation CD

Ready? Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download VirtualBox for OSX hosts

2. Double-click on the downloaded VirtualBox .DMG file and open it up. Then double-click on the VirtualBox.mpkg installer

Follow through all the prompts and click Close when done.

3. In the Applications folder, double click on the VirtualBox application

4. Once VirtualBox starts up, click the New icon

5. Go through the steps of the Wizard. At first, give your new virtual machine a name (you can think of a virtual machine as your new Windows-inside-your-Mac). Give it as much memory as you want but don’t go below the recommendation. For this I stuck with the base 192 Megs but you may want to bump it up if you can.

6. If you are doing this for the first time, chose New for Hard Drive and when you go through the wizard you probably want to choose Dynamic Storage

7. You can leave the name of your new virtual disk as-is and give it whatever you think you need for hard drive space.

8. Hit Finish to end the new virtual disk creation wizard, then Next to choose your new disk, then Finish

9. You’ll now see that the Settings and Start menus are activated. Before we start, we want to enable USB. Click the Settings Icon and then the Ports menu. Click Enable USB Controller.

10. Click OK and then the Green Start arrow

11. You’re going to get a message about it auto-capturing your keyboard. All that is saying is that if you are “in Windows” and you do something like Alt-Tab, it will be doing the Alt-Tab in Windows and not in your Mac. If you don’t want that, just hold down the left Command key. Hit OK.

12. Now it’s time for the First Run Wizard. Pop in your Windows XP CD, choose where it is, and hit Next and Finish if it’s right.

13. Now we get the beautiful blue Windows install screens we know and love. Hit Enter to choose your new Unpartitioned Space and choose to format NTFS. Then let it run.

14. Create a Shared Folder so that your Mac can see documents that your Windows VM has scanned. Click the Shared Folders icon and then Add A Shared Folder.

15. Choose or create a folder and then click Make Permanent and hit OK

16. Before your new shared folder will work, in the top VirtualBox VM menu, choose Devices and then Install Guest Additions. Choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe and follow the prompts

17. Map that new folder to a drive letter, say in this example the Z drive. In Windows Explorer. go to My Network Places, Then Entire Network, then VirtualBox Shared Folders and you should see \\VBOXSVR\Scanned (or whatever you called your new folder). Right click on that and choose Map Network Drive and give it a drive letter.

18. Now it’s time to follow Fujitsu’s instructions for installing your Windows ScanSnap. Don’t plug in your ScanSnap yet but install the software on your Setup CD.

19. Plug in your ScanSnap and turn it on. You will likely find.. nothing happens. Your light on your ScanSnap may blink. You need to tell VirtualBox that you want to enable it first. Click on the Ports icon on the bottom of your VM and choose your scanner from the list of devices.

20. Scan away! Either scan to a folder or using ScanSnap Organizer. Either way, if you want your PDFs to be accessible by the Mac you will probably want to scan them to your drive that you created in step 17.

There we go. It’s really not as complex as this 20 step tutorial may make it sound, but if you give it a try let me know how it goes.

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.

Recently I’ve been asked quite a bit how to use Evernote with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. It’s a great combination and quite easy. Here’s a video that runs you through the processs. The video shows the Mac version, but Windows will be the same concept.

In a nutshell, here is what you do. In this example I’ll be creating a new ScanSnap Manager Profile, but you can modify an existing one if you want.

• Right click on ScanSnap Manager and choose Settings. If the options are grayed out, disable Quick Menu for ScanSnap Manager
• On the Applications tab, hit Add Or Remove
• Hit Add, click Browse, and find your Evernote application. It will likely be in the Applications folder on the Mac, or C:\Program Files\Evernote on Windows
• Hit Close
• In the “Select A Profile” box, choose Add Profile and give it a name like “Scan To Evernote”
• On the Applications tab, choose Evernote for the Application. Hit Apply.
• Click on ScanSnap Manager and make sure that your new Profile is selected
• Scan and enjoy!

Does anyone else use the ScanSnap with Evernote? Do you do it any other way? Let us know in the comments.