Anyone who has been on the phone with me will know two things about me. First, I talk to myself a lot, and second, I take a lot of notes.[1]
I have played around with taking notes on my iPad, but more often than not I am re-using the back of paper from around the house.
This might surprise some of you and I can hear it now – “What? Mr. Paperless takes paper notes?”
Guilty as charged, but to me the key is not our use of paper but what we do with it afterwards. As Malcolm Gladwell writes:
The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper.
I generally use Evernote to store my notes, and until recently I scanned my notes to PDF, stored them in Evernote, and got rid of the paper.
I did this for years until I wrote this newsletter issue about Evernote and handwritten notes. To quote myself:
One of the big keys is, for handwritten notes, to scan the documents as JPGs instead of PDF. For whatever reason, their handwriting recognition only works on images.
Now, my handwriting is absolutely abysmal[2], but Evernote has proven remarkably adept at indexing it, so I have switched my workflow to scanning my handwritten Evernote-bound notes to JPG instead of PDF. Here is how I do it.
Scanning To JPG
I use a ScanSnap S1300i, but this will work with any scanner that will scan to JPG.
On the ScanSnap Manager Application tab, I choose Scan To Evernote (Note).
On the File option tab, I set it to scan to JPG.
Prepare And Scan To Evernote
This will sound strange, but when I am scanning handwritten notes, I scan them in reverse order.
You will see why in a moment, but if I am scanning a three page document, I stack the paper so that page 3 is on top and page 1 is on the bottom.
Once the paper is stacked in reverse order, I pop it in the scanner and go.
Process and Merge Pages In Evernote
Some of you may have seen this coming a few steps ago, but if you are scanning to JPG, it will create one file for each page. If you are scanning to Evernote, it will create one note for each page, as you can see below.
Some people may work around this by scanning to a folder on the computer and then dragging the JPGs to a new note, but I prefer to keep things as frictionless as possible and do it all in Evernote.
Fortunately, newer versions of the Mac and Windows clients give you the ability to merge notes together. Highlight the pages of your document, and on the right side you will see a Merge button.
Once you click it, your notes will all be merged to one note, and your pages will show up one after another in the new note.
The merging will be in the order that the notes show up in Evernote. Since I normally keep my notebooks sorted in Descending Date order, I needed to scan my documents in reverse order so that Page 1 would be at the top. This way when I merged, everything is all nicely in order.
One thing that I know will annoy some of you: when you merge notes together, it shows the title between each page like in the above screenshot. You can either leave it like this, or if it bugs you, just highlight the text and delete it.
This Evernote handwritten note workflow has been working really well for me. If you have another way that you process handwritten notes, I’d love to hear it.
(Photo by photosteve101)
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Could you possibly make a short youtube video on this?
Sure! I'll see what I can do this week.<p style=”color: #A0A0A8;”>
Just a note to let you know that OCR does work in .pdf documents, though I think this is a pro feature.
Once a note has been OCRed (is that a real word?) it stays OCRed even if you let your subscription lapse.
Hi John,You are right that OCR works in PDF documents. That works really well. What *doesn't* work is OCR for handwriting. That only works for JPG files at the moment, regardless of your subscription level.Thanks for commenting! <p style=”color: #A0A0A8;”>
Ah! I see what you mean now!
Brooks this is fantastic! Thank you for this! I agree you should make a short YouTube video on it
Thanks Sophie, how can I say no?
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Using a LiveScribe pen is another great way to save handwritten notes to Evernote. The send to evernote feature makes it really easy and you can also save a copy that has embedded audio as a separate file or embedded in a pdf.
Good call Corey. Believe it or not I have never tried a LiveScribe, but I know many many people love it.
Great post, Brooks! There's always an occasion for scrap pieces of paper and sticky notes! Sending it to Evernote is great with my ScanSnap. My workflow involves scanning single page docs as JPEG and then multi-page docs as PDF. To John's point, I like to be able to search against my handwriting. To Corey's point – I love the Livescribe pen. Amazing tool and find it great for meetings!
OK everyone, this is now up in video format: http://www.documentsnap.com/video-evernote-handwr…
Quick question for you – I, like you, initially was scanning all my handwritten notes to PDF. As of reading this, I changed that to JPG because of the OCR of handwriting. Now what can I do with the 100's of PDFs of handwritten notes? Think there is anyway to go back and convert the PDFs to JPG in some sort of script fashion to take advantage of this?
print out the pdf's and rescan them as jpg'S
Hmm, well taking a PDF and kicking out a bunch of images should be pretty easy. There's even an Automator action to do that.
Since Evernote's AppleScript support is pretty good, I'd think that something like this could be bolted together. It might be worth checking with the king of Evernote AppleScripts, Justin over at http://veritrope.com/. You might be able to get/hire him to whip something up for you?
I believe you can save PDF as (Save As..) JPG. At least that's a feature in Adobe Acrobat. YMMV.
I'm very excited about this. I write a lot of handwritten notes and I save them because I want to write a book about the lost art of handwritten notes. I scan some and file some, but none are saved on Evernote, which I use for so many other things. I'm going to have a heck of a time gathering them all together when I get ready to write the book.
Moving to your system will help a lot. Thank you!
Started using Evernote today – I believe I've solved your "reversal" issue which should save you from needing to physically reverse the pages.
- I'm using the latest version of Evernote as of today 12/19/12 which is v5.x, FYI.
- When merging the pages -> click the notes (while holding down Control on Windows) in the order that you want them to be top-to-bottom, then click merge.
- Do not try to Control+Shift the entire list or it will do it the way that you've presented and list the notes out of order, you must click the notes 1 by 1 selecting them in the order you would like them to merge!
If only we could get the dev team to allow us to remove the headers that are created this would be even smoother!
Hope this helps- Geaux Tigers!
Joe
Nice thanks Joe! I'll have to try this!
Brooks,
Daniel Gold just wrote his last post by hand into his Moleskine notebook, and then added it to Evernote, where it was emailed to iDictate – [email protected]- where we transcribed it using live typists.
A copy of his post is at http://idictate.blogspot.com/2013/03/reinventing-…
This works with any handwritten document.
As a disclaimer, I am the ceo of iDictate.