Not sure if anyone has the answer here, but I have a use case where I want to save copies of the current day’s written journal notes to my Bear note for the same day. With the OCR capabilities, this could be very handy indeed.
If I’m using the native features in Bear — taking a photo or scanning pages to a multi-page PDF — which is the best route? Both allow for OCR capabilities, but want to consider file size.
Assume a multi-page PDF would be smaller in size than photos snapped by my iPhone, but not clear if that’s altogether true. Anyone attempted this?
I prefer images over PDFs for handwritten notes, as it shows in the note preview, is easier to read without clicks, and I can resize it. I have a few shortcuts related to bringing in my written notes that make all the difference. The shortcut described in the images below shows what I do with PDFs or any other images to get it into Bear. This shortcut accepts files or copied items, lets you choose the size of the image (great for saving storage space), and has a few ways of dealing with the output, with bringing up my Bear daily note for pasting, and creating a new Bear note with the image automatically included and a title that is auto-generated from the image (this also works better for multi-page documents), as the options I use the most. I trigger this most often from either the share sheet on the file I want to bring into Bear or via a shortcut alias in the control center.
Note that this shortcut has to make intermediate image files that are then deleted after processing. The deletion process asks for permission because sometimes I like to keep those files around for another purpose, so I added the extra click.
For scanning, I prefer the Preview app because it is easier to crop and copy (crop is rectangular vs the more free-form used in scanning elsewhere, which works better for just trimming blank space off the page), but you could use whatever you want to create the source clipboard copy or file.
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Oh this is wonderful. Do you have a standard size you choose for images of your notes? And agree with the idea of having these as images (generally). I can’t recall, but I’m trying to remember if I can edit PDFs when viewing in Bear and then save the changes back to the version Bear holds. If yes, that’s a possible benefit for PDFs.
One of the reasons I stick with Bear is its fantastic handling of media. Buttery good.
The reason I have the size picker is not just to decide if it is high or low res, but more often to match the paper width. I find the phone scanner to be really hit on miss on gauging paper size, so sometimes it captures something like A6 as a 300k image and sometimes as a 4 MB image — setting the horizontal pixel count is a good way to get an easy to read image that doesn’t take up that much space. Typically I am jotting notes on A7-A5 pages and tend to use 400-600 pixels as the setting.
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