Finding text in Bitmaps – OneNote to the rescue

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This is seriously cool. Someone left me a huge document – printed on paper (so 20th Century) – on my desk for review. What to do? I wanted to use my PC to annotate, correct, add and stuff.

Well, I started reading, got a text marker and a pencil and began scribbling on the first page. I am not a very patient guy… and got tiered almost immediately. And then it hit me. Isn’t there a printer driver shipping w/ OneNote. A printer that allows you to Send to OneNote? Yes, there is. Here’s how OneNote turned my day into a happy day.

First, the original electronic version was nowhere to find. So I scanned the document into a PDF format. Now that I had it in PDF, I used the Send to OneNote virtual printer and sent the whole PDF to OneNote.

Second, as we all know, in OneNote you can now easily annotate, write over the existing text that is available as bitmap in OneNote, and more. That’s more like, say, beginning of the 21st century. But wait, the document is still 40+ pages. How do I find all the locations within the document where the same changes should be applied? And this is where it seriously gets cool and more 2014’ish.

Third, pasting (or in this case) printing a bitmap into OneNote triggers its built-in OCR feature. OMG. Finding and annotating is sooo much better, faster, and less stressful using OneNote.

One caveat! The virtual printer of OneNote may not available on every device supported by OneNote while, once you have a bitmap with text in your OneNote, you can search within its text. I did the print on a Windows PC in my office and later searched the bitmap for text on a Mac in a Windows Phone

Go download your free copy of OneNote.

@volkerw.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2015
    PDF format have good result of print and quick to upload , One Note is best way to printing a bitmaps.

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2015
    you have been pointed out there is good resource to help for us.I am waiting to your next update.

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2015
    good resource i have never idea about this but sae your post full of idea and motivated me. http://goo.gl/Fl7esv

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2016
    great you did such a great job and read that documents but share with us whats was in that documents.? www.theeducationalists.com

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2016
    Great help, I was looking for an authentic solution for so long. I haven't try OneNote yet, now I will.  www.classicalcontent.com/report-writing.html