On Episode #5 of Adapt, Federico challenged Ryan to find two apps capable of searching very large PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR for short). OCR is a really handy tool for reviewing long manuscripts that are often in PDF form — I use OCR in one form or another quite often, and it has saved me a hefty amount of time.

In the episode, Ryan set himself a rule: He didn’t want to spend any money on this challenge. In doing so, he found two scanner apps that allowed him to complete the challenge by way of 30-day free trials. I also didn’t want to spend any money on this challenge, but unlike Ryan I remembered that I already paid for an app that supports PDF search using OCR: GoodNotes.

An OCR App With Built-In Note-Taking

If you haven’t heard of GoodNotes, suffice it to say that it is perhaps the best note-taking app available on iOS (Notability is it’s equal — aesthetic preference is often the only tie-breaker) — custom templates, fluid handwriting, and extensive features like automatic shape drawing set it apart from nearly all its competition. But did you know that GoodNotes can make a 900+ page PDF searchable in mere minutes with OCR?

GoodNotes has long had a search feature in its app that allows you to quickly find text in individual notebooks (and now across all notebooks) via OCR. It works blazingly quickly, and I use it often to find specific details in my handwritten meeting notes or in annotations on lecture slides. However, if you combine this OCR search with GoodNotes’ support for both scanning and uploading PDFs you can easily turn large documents into searchable PDFs using OCR.

GoodNotes was able to index all 974 pages of the Affordable Care Act using OCR in under two minutes.

For my testing, I wanted to go a little bigger than Ryan’s ~400 page PDF — I figured more than doubling the page count with a copy of the 974-page Affordable Care Act would do the trick. Even with such a large document, going from import to searching keywords took under five minutes using GoodNotes’ built-in OCR. Perhaps more impressive is that GoodNotes apparently does all of this magic using Apple’s native Vision and Natural Language Parsing tools, because I ran a test while in Airplane Mode and got the exact same speedy results.

More Than Just PDF Search

Beyond the already-useful feature of creating searchable PDFs, GoodNotes has some extra tools to give you even more flexibility when working with OCR’d documents. Highlighting OCR’d text not only allows you to easily copy and paste snippets from the PDF, but GoodNotes allows you to highlight or strikeout the OCR’d text as well. In addition, GoodNotes supports character recognition in 17 languages, expanding access to this feature across the globe. Lastly, GoodNotes seemingly allows you to export an editable version of this PDF (optionally including your annotation if needed), which in theory means that you can revise the PDF document in a program like Adobe Acrobat or the like (though I have not been able to test this).

Highlighting and adding strikethrough to OCR’d text, full PDF export support, and support for 17 languages makes GoodNotes an excellent OCR app.

Adapt #5 Challenge, Evaluated:

Although I didn’t adhere to Federico’s requirement of finding two OCR apps, I think I accomplished the spirit of this challenge by finding a new use for an app I already use daily. Working primarily on an iPad sometimes requires you to use the wrong app in an unexpected way to get something done — GoodNotes will probably be my go-to app from now on for using OCR on large PDF documents (while remaining my favorite note-taking app as well!), even though that isn’t the main purpose of the app. You might say I’ve adapted it to my needs.

Editor’s Note: You caught me — I’m skipping some of the Adapt Challenges. I’ve decided (partially from getting so behind on the podcast) that I’ll try to accomplish the ones I find are the most useful as learning tools for the average iPad user (especially students).

On episode two of Adapt, both Ryan and Federico had a challenge that they each had to report back on — Ryan had to use a third-party HomeKit app to control his smart home devices, and Federico had to write and publish an article entirely using Apple Notes. Given the fact that A. I do not have very many smart home devices, and B. the Apple Notes challenge seemed more interesting to me, I decided to only tackle that challenge for the purposes of this article.

To accomplish this challenge, I attempted to write and publish my recent review of the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard entirely using Apple Notes. Here's how it went:

Manual Markdown's Mediocrity

Typically, I write my posts in Markdown using Ulysses — I find its minimalist interface combined with its live Markdown preview to be very useful when adding links or formatting to a post. Apple Notes, however, does not support Markdown in its text editor — you either need to write using rich text or enter the Markdown formatting manually in plain text in order to get the results you expect. For a moment, I considered writing the post using rich text (since I use Microsoft Office so often, this is just as natural for me), but ran into an issue fairly critical to writing a blog post: links. To my knowledge, there isn't an easy way to give a URL a title in Apple Notes — a non-starter in a medium that thrives on in-text links. So, manually typing out the Markdown was the way to go.

Manually typing out Markdown syntax turned out to be easier than dealing with Rich Text while writing an article in Apple Notes.

Once I was set on manually typing out the Markdown syntax in Apple Notes, writing the article actually wasn't so bad. As it turns out, most text editors can handle most of the text-editing you throw at them. Yes, I did miss the live Markdown preview that Ulysses provides, but if you spend enough time commenting on Reddit you get pretty accustomed to looking at plain text Markdown and translating it. In addition, Federico was kind enough to provide a universal Preview Markdown Shortcut that takes anything written in plain-text Markdown and preview it with HTML in a pop-up web view. This gave me the option to at least check my work, in case I had misplaced a bracket or parenthesis while typing.

Using the Preview Markdown shortcut that Viticci shared allowed me to find small typos in my text — like the missing space after my Title header!

Using Apple Notes also didn't impact the way I embed images in my posts. I use a custom Shortcut to upload image(s) from my Cameral Roll, add alt text and a caption, and generate HTML text that ultimately displays the image on my website. This works just as well in any text editor, since what I insert is plain-text anyway.

Federico also mentioned an issue he ran into with the way Apple Notes deals with URLs — specifically, Apple Notes can show you a “card” of the URL rather than the plain text URL needed for Markdown links. I did not run into this problem while copy/pasting links into my Notes document. One theory I have is that this “card” view only occurs when you drag and drop URLs from an app into Apple Notes. I probably avoided it since I habitually tap the Safari URL bar to manually copy the text anyway.

Between a Rock and a Squarespace

Although I didn't have any problems writing the post itself in Apple Notes, the challenge dictates that I also have to publish from Apple Notes as well. Federico accomplished this using a Shortcut tied into his WordPress back-end — a logical approach, considering how well-integrated WordPress is with so much of the web. Unfortunately for me, Peer Reviewed is a Squarespace site, which significantly limits my options for automating a blog post. The only streamlined way to publish a blog post on a Squarespace site is using a bookmarklet they provide — which really just opens the typical blog post menu and doesn't help me publish from Apple Notes. So, this is where I failed this Adapt challenge. However, in the spirit of Adapt, I still published the article entirely on my iPad using the Squarespace app (which was significantly improved just in time for Safari on iPadOS to render it useless).

Publishing a post to Squarespace from their iOS app has significant limitations, but gets the job done.

Transferring my Markdown text from Apple Notes to Squarespace's Markdown editor was easy enough, but the settings menu for the post was lacking in features I've grown to expect on the desktop site. The post URL did not follow my site-wide URL format and had to be manually modified, and I was unable to add any Tags or Categories that didn't already exist in my list. Other than those gripes, the article did get published so at least the Squarespace app could manage that.

Adapt Challenge #2, Evaluated

Although I failed this Adapt challenge, it still got my wheels turning on improvements to my writing workflow (and my website hosting choices). I'm already pondering Shortcuts that might streamline the publishing process even more for future articles, and may do some write-ups on them another time. That being said, I'm already back to writing in Ulysses and relegating Apple Notes to grocery lists and "notes I might need in a year".

Over at MacStories, Federico Viticci and Ryan Christoffel have started a new podcast on RelayFM called Adapt — a podcast entirely dedicated to their love of the iPad. A key element of this new podcast are the "challenges" that the hosts give each other to stretch the boundaries of what they can do on iOS (iPadOS? This transition is going to be difficult). Since I also consider my iPad Pro my primary productivity device, I've decided to participate in the challenges presented on each new episode of Adapt. In episode one, Ryan challenges Federico to add a third-party iOS keyboard to his workflow, so I've done the same by trying out Yoink's third-party iOS keyboard for the first time.

Yoink is a clipboard manager/"shelf" app for iOS and the Mac that allows you to store snippets of text, URLs, images, and even files for easy access when you need them. Although the app itself is fully-featured and incredibly useful, I'll primarily be focusing on it's third-party keyboard integration in this article.

The Keyboard for All of Your Content

Yoink the app and the third-party keyboard both serve the same basic purpose: to deliver content you need to where you need it. If you frequently use a large snippet of text, you can store it in Yoink for easy access. If you're constantly sharing the same file with a team, toss it in Yoink and it'll always be handy. If you regularly send the same meme, well, you get the picture. Prior to using Yoink, I had never used a snippet manager of any kind (such as the ever-popular Text Expander) — but after using Yoink's third party software keyboard for a couple of weeks, I'll never be able to go back. Even though my current snippet collection is relatively small, Yoink and its software keyboard have already saved me enough time and energy to justify the one-time purchase price of $5.99.

My primary use-case for Yoink's software keyboard has been text snippets. As part of my work I have to access the same app on my iPad Pro upwards of 20 times a day, and due to the nature of the app, a specific URL needs to be entered every time (in addition to traditional login credentials). Although only about 25 characters long, typing in this URL is often the most tedious part of my day. Thanks to Yoink's software keyboard, this repetitive headache has been completely eliminated — now I can simply two-finger-tap the appropriate text snippet and the text field is auto-filled with the URL. Yoink also supports drag-and-drop on the iPad, but in most situations I find the two-finger tap to be faster.

Quickly inserting a snippet into a text field is easy with drag-and-drop or a two-finger tap on iPad.

I also moderate a few subreddits, so sending canned responses using Yoink's software keyboard to common rule violations or lost Redditors has been a big time-saver as well. The snippets can be modified to include Markdown formatting as plain-text, which Reddit quickly translates into its "Snoodown" format — catching all of the URLs and subreddit links I want to include.

Using Yoink to quickly send canned responses on subreddits I moderate is another useful timesaver.

As I mentioned above, Yoink is definitely not limited to just text snippets — images, files, or any other attachments you can think of can just as easily be accessed from Yoink's software keyboard. Though I haven't found a file or image I send frequently enough to justify keeping it in Yoink, I ran a quick test with a picture of our dog. As expected, accessing the image was just as fast as using the Photos iMessage app, but without the need to find the image since it was already stored in Yoink. Just tap the image or file to copy, and paste it into the iMessage text field to send.

Sending images and files with Yoink’s software keyboard is a breeze — just copy and paste.

Opportunities for Improvement

Although Yoink is already an incredibly feature-rich app, I have some suggestions for further improving its software keyboard. First and foremost: Please, for the love of God switch the position of the Device Switcher and the Keyboard Switcher ("Globe" icon) on the iPad — I still habitually tap the sample location to quickly switch between software keyboards, and this tiny difference ruins that process. Quite honestly, all software keyboards should be required to place the Keyboard Switcher icon in the same space to avoid this confusion. It's just the decent thing to do.

Second, a feature I found while searching the app store for other third party keyboard options was a system for postioning the cursor after a text snippet is inserted — for example, if the text snippet says:

The quick ** fox jumps over the lazy dog

it would be nice if Yoink could recognize the two asterisks and automatically place the cursor in between them and delete them from the snippet. This sort of "placeholder" text for the cursor would make some of my snippets even more useful, as currently I have to manually place the cursor in areas of the text that need individual customization after pasting. Obviously, the placeholder characters would need to be considered carefully to not break existing text snippets, but I think this feature has some serious potential.

Adapt Challenge #1, Evaluated

Although I didn't look much further than the show notes to find a software keyboard for the first Adapt Challenge, trying out Yoink was definitely worth my time. I am a little late to the game when it comes to using snippet manangers on iOS, but I think Yoink has just the right level of complexity for my needs. Although it lacks some of the features of more robust software (Text Expander again being the prime example), all I really need in my snippet manager is to quickly paste words into a text field. Yoink covers these needs quite well, despite my wishes for custom cursor placeholders to be added.

Since downloading Yoink for the purposes of this challenge, I've quickly adopted it into my workflow and often use it multiple times a day. Seamless storage and insertion of frequently-used text snippets makes Yoink an incredibly useful app for just about anyone using an iPad or iPhone to get things done.