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getting text from book into a notetaking app
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Posted by dan7000
Sep 14, 2013 at 07:43 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
Gary Carson wrote:
>
>With iOS at least there is the option to get an iPod Touch, which is an
>iPhone without the phone. No service charges etc.
When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or iPhone 4.
>
>But I’m personally skeptical about how effective this sort of notetaking
>would be in the case of extensive research, taking hundreds of notes
>from each book on an ongoing basis. E.g. One usually just wants a
>certain passage, not the text of an entire page.
Phone pictures works even better for a short passage because you can zoom in and you don’t have to get the whole page, which makes the resulting note easier to read and the OCR better. I type a lot faster than I talk, so if I’m going to copy a short passage from a book I’ll just type it.
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 14, 2013 at 08:06 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was
>pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or
>iPhone 4.
Was that a 4th gen. or 5th gen. iPod Touch? Just wondering if 5th gen. is any better.
>Phone pictures works even better for a short passage because you can
>zoom in and you don’t have to get the whole page, which makes the
>resulting note easier to read and the OCR better. I type a lot faster
>than I talk, so if I’m going to copy a short passage from a book I’ll
>just type it.
I guess I should have made it clear that when I dictate a passage in Dragon, I immediately put it into a note in Freeplane, where I organise my notes into a hierarchical outline (mind map), effectively reverse-outlining the argument of the book I’m reading (this is for heavy-going academic books, where seeing the overall outline of the argument—and where the quotes are coming from—helps comprehension).
So my focus is on immediate processing of the notes (rather than taking a lot of notes first and then processing them), which would be disrupted if I had to introduce an additonal step of uploading photos, OCR-ing them, and copying and pasting text into Freeplane.
From Freeplane I’d export the outline with notes into Bonsai, where I’d analyse it further, and then I’d import it as RTF into ConnectedText for storage.
Posted by WSP
Sep 14, 2013 at 08:13 PM
I have no problem getting sharp pictures with my iPhone, though it helps to use an app with an anti-shake option.
As I said earlier, I move my photos into Evernote, which has a supplementary program called Skitch. With Skitch I can crop and mark key passages quickly and efficiently—and there’s no need to leave Evernote while I do this.
As for the cost of a mobile phone, you’ll have to make your own decision about that. I bought mine for other purposes and then was delighted to discover that it also worked very nicely for note-taking.
Bill
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 15, 2013 at 08:40 AM
Gary Carson wrote:
>I was thinking I might be able to do the same kind of thing with a
>digital camera rather than a smartphone, but I’ve tried taking pictures
>of maps and documents with my camera and getting them in focus was a
>real problem. Can you really take a clear, focused picture of an entire
>page of a document with a smartphone?
I expect that a contemporary autofocus camera with anti-shake should be just as good as most smartphones for taking the actual picture; depending on the size/distance of the text, you may also want to use the macro option. I have a relatively cheap Panasonic Lumix of 2-3 years back and I have found it very effective for occasional document ‘scanning’ on the road. I just found this article with some interesting tips: http://diyivorytower.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/use-your-point-and-shoot-digital-camera-as-document-scanner/
That said, the main advantage of Smartphones is the integration of the various programs that do the anti-distortion and OCR work, not to mention the direct network syncing with Dropbox, Evernote or what have you, saving you from fiddling with SDs or USB cables whenever you photograph a document for immediate use. A camera solution for the latter might be this: http://www.eye.fi/
As for OCRing the image itself, there used to be a dedicated product by ABBYY, Fotoreader, but this seems to have been deprecated and is no longer available for download/purchase from their site. I suspect that its functionality has been integrated in their main product Finereader Pro.
Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 15, 2013 at 02:36 PM
You don’t really need to treat OCR as a separate task nowadays.
For example:
(a) If you have any image containing text and save it into OneNote, or clip any image or part-image containing text, into OneNote, then OneNote immediately and automatically OCRs it, and very accurately too. The text becomes copyable and searchable.
(b) Any such text in an image in OneNote is indexed by OneNote *and* by Windows Search, so is readily found from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search.
(c) If you save any image containing text as a TIF file to disk, then Windows Desktop Search/Index will automatically OCR and index the text in the image. The text is readily found from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search.
I used to use the ABBYY products, for OCR capture of text in images, but now no longer require to.
ABBY tools have thus arguably become obsolete, or at least partially so.
Not only images but words/phrases in sound files can be identified and indexed by OneNote. This can be very handy if you have recorded a meeting or (say) a radio interview to a sound file. All you need to do is save the sound file to OneNote, and it will be scanned quite rapidly in the background. Searches will later show the word or phrase you are looking for and the time into the recording when that word/phrase occurs.
Audio phrases in audio recordings saved into OneNote are readily found via Windows Desktop Search/Index from the Windows Desktop Search bar (click the Start button), or via the normal Windows Explorer search, or via OneNote search.