Ank HN: going paperless with android? | Hacker News Reader

Ank HN: going paperless with android?

3 pointsanotheryou6 comments

I'm looking for an app with the following requirements:

- make photos of documents

- automatic OCR (output preferably a PDF, but image and txt would be OK, too)

- no cloud

- batch photographing multiple pages

- touch to focus for half-empty pages where the cam refuses to focus in the center.

---

So far I have found nothing good among the 13(!) apps I tested.

Cloud infested: Abby FineScanner (even though they sell a mobile sdk for ocr, their app doesn't use it), Adobe Scan, the Google thing, Ms Office Lense

And the rest has various faults:

- Bad OCR (only letter by letter, not language assisted, so loads of typos, especially for german (ß/B, u/ü)). Sadly within this bunch while otherwise my best candidate: Scanbot.

- weird focusing or flash

- auto capturing out of focus

- a manual straightening step (I'd even build a shoe-box rig for scanning if I have to)

- no flash vignette removal (can't be that hard and would improve the OCR a lot, though here again a shoe-box rig with led strips could work )

I have got Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. It comes with S pen stylus. My setup involves, OneNote, Xodo (pdf reader), Squid (note taking), S Note, Termux (terminal emulation), Firefox, Office Lense etc. OneNote is perfectfor taking notes and sharing them immediately with fellow classmates in pdf format or sharing the whole notebook. There are plethora of note taking apps available in android including native Samsung app, but I have found myself fixated with the OneNote because of the reliability and desktop version of the app. I dont use android in stand alone mode, I have windows non-touch laptop which I use for fixing my notes in desktop version of OneNote as android version of OneNote lacks many essential features.

I hate the inability to copy rich text or images to clipboard inside android, otherwise Tab S3 is good to go as a slate.

If you are thinking of buying an android tablet, make sure you get a good stylus for yourself, otherwise your transition to paperless will be painful. for example you can check the features like palm rejection, pressure sensitivity, battery life, tilt support etc.. Surface devices are hailed for surface pen, but when I use them I find the pen bit heavy and big.

You can use office lense to take photos of your previous notes.

That is all ,there is to android.

Thanks!

I don't want to scan through office lense because of the cloud though :/

I don't know if this is counter to what you want to do, but I would encourage you to consider investing in a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500. It'll help you go paperless, and they have iOS/Android apps that you can scan direct to your mobile device. You also have the option of scanning direct to $CLOUD (it supports multiple cloud ecosystems).

Good luck.

Hi! I use FineScanner a lot and it literally saves me during my study period. I scan all abstracts and textbooks to not carry them with me all the time (that's about OCR). It also works pretty well with multi-page docs :) Good luck!

Automatic OCR of what? The entire document?

What type of documents? No cloud because of a regulation?

Once you have the document what are you going to do with it?

ORC from pictures of Snail-Mail and Bills.

No cloud because of personal preference.

I want OCR mainly for full-text search (so it does not have to be perfect or detect columns)

I want to put all my mail in a shoebox and only if I really need the original I want to dig through it again (hopefully I can estimate at which height in the box by the position of the files in their equivalent folder).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com