KXkxyvr·Sep 28, 2020
Though it doesn't help with someone trying to keep their notes in a bound notebook, I'm a huge fan of scanning notes and papers and here's my setup:
1. Scan with a Fujitsu fi-6130. This scanner is out of print and I believe the successors are the 7160 and 7180. When I purchased mine, it was somewhere between $900-1000 and I've used it actively for about a decade with zero issues.
2. Use xsane for scanning
3. (Optional) Use scantailor-advanced (https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced) for any cleanup
4. (Optional) Use tesseract for any ocr (does not work on handwritten notes, but works great for scans of papers, bills, etc.)
Generally speaking, I take hand notes on research topics and the collect them till I need to travel or get too many. Then, I scan each small collection into its own file. To make this easier to
Read the rest
back walk, all notes are dated, numbered, and given a general topic/title as I write them. Once they are scanned, they go into their own pdf file with a long file name that contains the date, title, and keywords that I want to use to find it. If there's a long thread of thought that needs to cross reference multiple files, I've added that information directly to the hand written note with a comment like (these notes use the following results from this date).
While not perfect, I've thousands of pages of notes and I've always been able to find what I've been looking for with little effort. I'm not sure anyone else could look at what I've done and search it as effectively because I kind of know how I think about problems and label things, but it works for me.
As a couple of other small tidbits:
- It takes too long to individually fix each scan using scantailor. A good scanner with a straight scan is *much* better than fixing things by hand. I will do it if I have to, but I'm disappointed in myself when I do.
- Slow scanners will kill this methodology and make things too burdensome. Don't use a flatbed scanner. Get a fast scanner with an autofeeder. They are expensive, so expect about $1000. That said, I've scanned tens of thousands of documents on mine and it's never failed, so a good scanner is worth the money in my opinion.
- I have thought about using a tablet like remarkable to take notes. My issue is that since I already own the scanner and paper notes are so incredibly robust especially when I'm on travel, I've been unable to justify the money. Though, annotating pdfs may be nice and a scanner doesn't help with that unless we want to print, markup, and then rescan, which is a little wasteful.