Playing around with RightNote this afternoon, I made a pleasant discovery, and I'm mentioning it here because others may have perhaps overlooked this feature too.

If you right-click on a text image (such as a clipping from a printed page in a book or a newspaper article) in one of your notes, and then select "Miscellaneous," you will see a box containing "Alternate text." It's easy to copy that text and paste it into your note, which gives a text version of the image. After doing this with some sharp images (where it was extremely accurate), I then compared a rather blurry sample in both RightNote and OneNote (since I've always thought this kind of conversion was one of OneNote's most attractive features), and I found that the (imperfect) texts generated in both programs were identical, so I assume there must be some underlying OCR software in Windows that both programs are using.

WSP wrote:

Playing around with RightNote this afternoon, I made a pleasant
discovery, and I'm mentioning it here because others may have perhaps
overlooked this feature too.

If you right-click on a text image (such as a clipping from a printed
page in a book or a newspaper article) in one of your notes, and then
select "Miscellaneous," you will see a box containing "Alternate text."
It's easy to copy that text and paste it into your note, which gives a
text version of the image. After doing this with some sharp images
(where it was extremely accurate), I then compared a rather blurry
sample in both RightNote and OneNote (since I've always thought this
kind of conversion was one of OneNote's most attractive features), and I
found that the (imperfect) texts generated in both programs were
identical, so I assume there must be some underlying OCR software in
Windows that both programs are using.

News to me! Is this something new in Rightnote? Version 4?

To me as well. I checked the website, RightNote PDF sheet and messages from the developer since I registered a few years ago, and there is no mention of this. I assume that it's relatively new and experimental and that he'll announce it once he's sure it works well, or that he simply did not consider it newsworthy--which I would find surprising.


Donovan wrote:

News to me! Is this something new in Rightnote? Version 4?

I just upgraded my license to the latest version of Rightnote Pro (4.9.0.1).
I don't see anything in the Alternate Text box. Here is what I did:
- Right-clicked on an image with text
- Selected 'Object Properties'
- Selected 'Miscellaneous'
At that point, I see the 'Alternate Text' box -- but it's empty. I've tried several different images with text - all very sharp, excellent samples - and I don't see anything. I needed to upgrade the license anyway, but I just checked my old version (3.5.6) and it has the same feature, with the same results. Like Alexander, I couldn't find a word in the documentation, online, or anywhere else about OCR in Rightnote. Duplicating what you described, it's all there except for any text in the AT box that somehow you are seeing. A mystery.

One other thought. It's possible this feature only works if you have an OCR engine Windows Service (or its Mac equivalent) running from another program.

I agree that this is all rather mysterious. What I offered here was an accurate description of my own experience, but I have no idea why others are getting different results. For what it's worth, I'm using RightNote Professional 4.9.0 on a Surface Pro 4 (Windows 10). Could the "professional" category be the explanation?

I'm baffled too why there is no mention of this in RightNote's documentation. I simply stumbled upon it.

I may write to Rael to ask him about it.

Rael tells me that RightNote definitely does not OCR texts in images. That sent me back to RN to do a series of experiments, and I think I can now explain how this fluke happened. Some of the images I was popping into RN came from a OneNote notebook, and I believe that ON was translating the images into text (in the background) before I copied them. This did not happen when I used images from the Web or other sources.

So that solves this little mystery.

Just a small postscript to this (slightly silly) discussion

I wonder how many (Windows) note-taking programs are actually capable of doing OCR of textual images? The only ones I'm familiar with are Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep. Are there others?

I ask because I have a lot of genealogical notes scattered around in various apps, and I would like, if possible, to consolidate them. Since a good number of the notes consist of pasted newspaper clippings, OCR would be extremely desirable.

WSP wrote:

Just a small postscript to this (slightly silly) discussion

I wonder how many (Windows) note-taking programs are actually capable of
doing OCR of textual images? The only ones I'm familiar with are
Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep. Are there others?

I ask because I have a lot of genealogical notes scattered around in
various apps, and I would like, if possible, to consolidate them. Since
a good number of the notes consist of pasted newspaper clippings, OCR
would be extremely desirable.

I dislike Google. For a lot of reasons. However, I have yet to find a better free solution than its auto-OCR of all images on Google Drive. If you have an image with any writing at all -- it is fully searchable on GD. Just right click on the image and select Open In Google Docs and you'll find the text from the image ready to edit. There's OCR and then there's useful and accurate OCR. It's amazingly accurate and so simple that I don't mind leaving the tool I want to import text to and going to Google Drive -- it literally takes a minute or less. Free.