Exporting PNGs from Notes to Evernote (on Max 2) to enable OCR image search

[retrography]

I have been playing with my Max 2 for about a week now, and I have noticed that I can get considerable jobs done on it.

Just one question: Is there any way to tell Note to export PNGs rather than PDFs when syncing with Evernote?

Evernote can OCR handwriting only if they are saved in image formats, so the current PDF sync shamefully falls short of being the most amazing possible feature, as Evernote fails to search in the files. Is there any way to force Notes to upload PNGs rather than PDFs?

For instance livescribe creates one Binder for itself and then creates a notebook for each notebook with every page represented with one separate note in Evernote, containing an image. That would be the ideal setting here.

It would also be great if we could exclude the template from the export to facilitate the image search. I have noticed Note saves the template and the handwriting as two superposed images, so it shouldn’t be technically daunting to exclude one of the two

[danielo515]

I'm also interested about knowing this.
I didn't used Evernote in a while, but this feature may change that.

[danielo515]

In any case, if you export your notes as PDF and then upload them to google drive then you can search. Seems that google drive applies OCR on the PDFs

[retrography]

You can also upload the PDF, convert it, and then reupload it to Evernote, but that totally breaks the workflow. The whole point of it is the seamless sync.

[retrography]

In absence of that facility, here is an AppleScript (if you are on Mac) that exports the PDFs from the selected notes, retains only the scribble layer (discards the template), converts that layer into PNGs and then appends those PNGs at the end of the original notes:

tell application "Evernote"

set thePath to path to temporary items

set thePath to the POSIX path of thePath

set thePath to thePath & "ever"



set theSelection to get selection

repeat with theNote in theSelection

set theSelecList to {theNote}

export theSelecList to thePath format HTML

do shell script "cd " & thePath & "; /usr/local/bin/pdfimages -p -png *.resources/*.pdf ever; /usr/local/bin/mogrify -negate *.png"

set theImages to do shell script "cd " & thePath & "; for i in $(/bin/ls *.png | /usr/bin/cut -d '-' -f 2 | /usr/bin/uniq); do /bin/ls ever-$i-*.png | /usr/bin/tail -n 1; done | /usr/bin/tr '

' ',' | /usr/bin/sed 's/.$//'"

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","

set the imageList to every text item of the theImages

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""

repeat with theImage in imageList

append theNote attachment thePath & "/" & theImage

end repeat

end repeat

do shell script "rm -rf " & thePath

end tell

Btw, you need Poppler and ImageMagick for the script to run.