Searching in handwriting notes and images, documents attached

Hello,

I am very lucky with Agenda right now. But I thing I am missing: searching in handwriting notes, photos and documents.

For handwriting notes it is clear what kind of use-case it is. But often I make a photograph from a whiteboard and it would be perfect, if I can search in such attachments, too.

I’ve seen that the notes app by Apple can search in such things (handwriting notes and attachments). And Noteshelf (an app for ipad for handwiting notes) is able to search and transfer my handwritings into real text, that I can copy and reuse in other apps.

Oh, thats more that I want to say, but this would be perfect if Agenda can supports this someday.

BR
Thorsten

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I miss the same things…OCR, annotate PDF and search in Documents and Handnotes.

Thanks for the feedback!

We could consider adding OCR for typed documents. In fact, we do a little bit of this in the new scan feature, though it is not used for search yet.

Unfortunately hand writing OCR is very difficult. There are products we could use to do handwriting recognition when you directly write in the app, but they are expensive, and they don’t work on general images with handwriting, only if you write in the app.

It is made more frustrating by the fact that Apple clearly do have some technology, but they do not make it available to other developers. We have put in requests for this. I don’t know why they haven’t made this available. It’s possible it only works for very specific languages, or they just want to have an advantage. Hopefully they will release it in future and we can support it.

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Make an alliance with GoodNotes…please !!!

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Hello-
I am been searching and looking for an update on search capability for scanned documents. Is this currently still in development? I have done several tests to search in scanned documents, without success.
Thanks,
Mike

At this moment we don’t index yet scanned documents, it’s quite a lot of work to make that happen. Not impossible, but not trivial either. We’ll keep it in mind if we work on this area again.

Any news on the OCR topic, is iOS 16 providing OCR support for developers finally?

I believe iOS 16 has added some support for “live text”. It would allow us to have the standard UI for live text, where you can press the button, select some text, and copy it.

We will investigate adding this in an upcoming release. We didn’t get to it this release cycle, and are too busy with collaboration for Agenda 16.

But this is certainly high on our priority list. Will see what we can do.

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I am looking forward this feature too. Apple notes event better at this. I will buy it as soon as this being supported.

We are looking at this feature now.

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I have been looking at this today, but I’m not sure exactly what is missing. If you currently preview an image or even a drawing you made, you can long tap on any text to select it, and then copy etc. AFAIK this is the same as what Apple Notes is doing.

I tried to select text in Apple Notes drawing mode, but that didn’t seem to work. That is perhaps something we could investigate.

Can you explain the feature you would like to have? Is selecting text in the preview not enough? Is search more important than copy of text?

Thanks for your reply.

Apple Notes could search full text in pictures. It indexes text in pictures, including hand writings. It is very nice to take a picture of some text and then some day, you can find the picture according the keywords.

And what the best is, you can search a picture by intelligent recognition. such as you have a picture of big house, and you can search with keyword “house” to find it.

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So the important thing for you is being able to find a note based some text in an image? Basically, just got search purposes?

We could probably look at doing that. I was thinking you were after copying or extracting text from an image, which is related, but not exactly the same.

We’ll consider the search option. We have a big search project planned, so it might fit into that.

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Thank you so much for looking into this. My use case would be putting in documents and receipts, etc. without having to tag them extensively and being able to find them via Keywords from these documents later on.

I think it would tie in really nicely with a search project - and it would potentially be not as complex to implement if there is an Apple-provided backend for the OCR notes integration.

Doing that yourself would be a gigantic pain I imagine so hopefully there’s a way to integrate a pre-made solution from the OS-OCR-capability…

I also wanted to say how thankful I am for the work you’ve done. It is a true delight to use Agenda.

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Thanks for the feedback. We will see what we can do about indexing the content of images.

That’d be amazing, I can see it coming in handy with zoom screenshots and IRL photos of whiteboards/slides and physical journal entries.

For me, it’s about taking handwritten notes such as with my Apple Pencil and then being able to OCR search that hand written content so I don’t have to tag content to be able to search it.

I’d also like to be able to default to handwritten notes, with a background such as in good notes

We are following this space, but it seems it is tricky. Apple do support OCR, but it doesn’t really work with handwriting, at least not well enough. It seems that to properly capture handwriting, you need to capture timings of every stroke, which is a step beyond OCR.

In any case, we would like to have this option, and will see what comes along.

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Hi Drew! Handwriting is understandable, but would it be easier to implement standard ocr just for usual pictures/pdfs? Or is that just as tricky?