Advice on research software

Posted by WSP
Aug 17, 2013 at 07:13 AM

I’ve tried various kinds of note-taking software through the years for writing books, but at the moment Evernote is my preferred solution. Just last week, for example, I was studying a large body of archival material at a library a considerable distance from home. Fortunately the library allowed me to use my iPhone camera, and I took as many pictures as possible, combining the images into PDF files with an app called CamScanner.

Now that I’m back home, I pop those PDFs into Evernote, which indexes them all very efficiently. In many cases I also create additional notes on this material in Evernote (i.e., I place the PDF on the left side of my screen and Evernote on the right side). I OCR the PDFs in PDF-Xchange before I embed them in Evernote, but strictly speaking that’s not necessary, because Evernote does its own recognition. (It even recognizes handwriting, though not very reliably.)

In fact, even when I’m sitting in my study or in a library closer to home, I often snap a picture of a paragraph or two in a book or journal, and within a few minutes after I insert that photo in Evernote, the text becomes searchable. I find that this approach saves me a lot of time otherwise devoted to typing.

Organization is not Evernote’s strength (though note-taking certainly is), but I’ve found a solution that works more or less satisfactorily. I create links to individual notes (very easy to do) and insert them into a note called “Outline: Chap. 1,” etc. There they can be manipulated into something resembling a traditional outline if that’s what you want.

Bill