May 05
2012

Update for Onetastic: Select Text from Image

OneNote can recognize the text in images in your notes and you can even search them. It also has a little hidden feature that allows you to copy the text from an image. You can just right click on an image and choose Copy Text From Picture. This doesn't always do what you want though. You may want to just copy an address or a tracking number from a screenshot. But copying the whole text and then pasting it somewhere and then finding what you want is cumbersome. Wouldn't it be nice if you could select and copy the text from the image similar to copying from the web? An update to Onetastic which adds this new feature is now available: Select Text from Image.

 

Let's say you have the following screenshot you captured from a web site and want to copy some text in it.

 

 

You can access the Select Text from Image feature from the right click menu along with two other Onetastic features, Rotate Printout and Crop.

 

 

You can see here that the selectable text is highlighted with yellow. If there is some text you see on the image that is not highlighted, that won't be selectable, as OCR engine did not recognize it. You can also see that the text is arranged in two regions here (purple boxes). Depending on how the text is arranged, you may see a single region or several regions. Moving your mouse on the text and dragging while pressing your left mouse button will start selecting the text, just like you used to do pretty much anywhere else:

 

 

Note that with a single drag selection, you can select text within a single region. It was too complicated to find a way to select across regions with a single drag. However once you select some text from a region, you can then press and hold the Ctrl key and select more text from other regions. Clicking anywhere on the window will clear the selection.

 

Also if you noticed the button below the image was reading "Copy All Text and Close" and once you make a selection it turns into "Copy Selection and Close". The button does what it says. If you didn't select anything, then it will copy all the text on the image, and if you selected some text it will copy just the selection and then close the dialog. You can also use the universal copy shortcut: Ctrl + C.

 

As simple as that. Hopefully this will save a bunch of time. One thing worth noting is that OCR is not a perfect technology and may not detect all the words 100% correctly. So you may end up having to fix the copied text, which is most of the time easier than re-typing the whole thing.

 

One minor issue is also fixed with this update. Custom styles with font names containing spaces (like "Times New Roman") is now working properly.

Comments

Mar 14
2012

Update for Onetastic: Favorites and Custom Styles

An update to Onetastic which adds two new features is now available: Favorites and Custom Styles. If you noticed an "Update Available" button on your ribbon and came here, that is awesome, let me know if that is the case.

 

Favorites

Last update introduced a mini feature: Pin to Desktop. This was a button on the ribbon that would create a link to the current page on desktop. Favorites is an extension of that. The button is now what we call a split button, which has a top part to do the one-click action and the bottom part which is a menu:

 

 

Let's start with the menu and what the button does will be obvious after that. The menu allows you to select where to pin the shortcut: Desktop, as before, Favorites menu, or some other location. You can switch between them and the button will reflect this:

 

 

You can click on Browse... and then select a folder of your choice and that will appear in the list. If "Desktop" is selected, the feature will work as before and clicking the Pin to button will create a shortcut to the current page on the desktop. If you selected a folder via Browse... then the shortcut will be created there instead. (You can then create a toolbar for that folder in your taskbar for easy access). If you select "Favorites Menu" then the shortcuts will be placed in the Favorites part of the menu.

 

The favorites menu is a convenient way to access your frequent pages (or sections) and you can keep adding things there as you like. If you want to remove or rename the menu items, click on the Manage Favorites button at the bottom of the menu and that will open up the folder where these are stored, which is %AppData%\Onetastic\Favorites:

 

 

You can then delete or rename items here. If you already had pinned pages on your desktop you can move them here if you want them in your Favorites menu.

 

Finally a small feature is added to the top of this menu: Pin this Section. You can pin a shortcut to the current section, just like for pages, to either Desktop, Favorites Menu or to the folder of your choice. All of this will hopefully satisfy all kinds of scenarios about accessing your content faster.

 

Custom Styles

Second feature that is coming with this update is Custom Styles. I must admit that I didn't expect such a feature to be this complicated, as it took a lot of time to get it right. To give some idea, I wrote the favorites feature in an afternoon, whereas custom styles probably took more than two weeks. Also along the way I found several OneNote bugs, which is great because this gives us a chance to fix them.

 

Anyway, let's talk about styles in OneNote. I do not care much about formatting in OneNote, as it is usually a place for me to capture information quickly and focus on content rather than style. For instance I am writing this post in OneNote but not formatting it there, once I am done with it I will then format it elsewhere for the website. Maybe for this reason, the style support in OneNote is very basic. There is a styles gallery which has a fixed number of styles and you cannot customize them or add new ones:

 

 

For instance I want to use "Code" style, which has a fixed-width font, but I don't like Courier New, I prefer Consolas, which means I can't use it because I cannot customize it. Word has extensive customizable styles feature and some people really want to have it in OneNote. Enter Custom Styles:

 

 

Another reason I decided to implement this feature was that it would go deep inside manipulating page content and I haven't done that before in an add-in. Image features like crop or rotate, is somewhat related but they deal with a very specific content type. Formatting in OneNote has a lot of components like font, color, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough, bullets/numbering, alignment, subscript/superscript, highlight and paragraph spacing. So Custom Styles feature is a way to capture a set of formatting applied to a piece text and then reusing it later.

 

The way you create new custom styles is this: You first style a piece of text as you want, then click on Custom Styles > Save Selection as Custom Style, which will display the following dialog:

 

 

First, this dialog allows you to give your custom style a name. You can also select a style you previously created and overwrite using the drop down. Second, the dialog shows all the applied style information on the selection and you get to choose which ones you want in the custom style. For instance in this case the selection had bold/italic, left aligned, Calibri 11 red etc. If you only want the style definition to be: Apply bold and italic, and not about the font, color etc. you can deselect all but the Apply Bold and Apply Italic. As you do so, you will see that the preview is updated. For example if you deselect Color (red), then the preview text will turn black. If this whole thing confuses you, you can as well ignore it all together and the results will most likely be fine. Once you are satisfied with your style definition, you can click OK and the new style will be added to the gallery, with the same preview you have seen in the dialog.

 

I added 17 styles with the installation and I did it all with this dialog. They include my own "Code" style with Consolas font :). I believe the way I implemented the dialog and style definition is very flexible, so you can create a style that only has certain style elements (e.g. just a bullet) and doesn't modify other characteristics of text, though it might be a bit confusing and seem complicated at first. So let me know what you think about this and your ideas on how it can be improved.

 

I also added Language to the style so you can choose to change the proofing language for the text with a custom style. This can also be used to get rid of red squiggles for things like source code. You can just create a style with Language = some language that you don't have proofing tools installed for, and OneNote will not be able to spell check.

 

Now that we created some styles, it is time to use them. This is the simple part, you just select some text and choose your style of choice and Onetastic will apply all the paragraph and formatting information you saved before. If you want to delete some of the custom styles you created or is installed by default, you can click on Manage Custom Styles at the bottom of the gallery and the same dialog will appear, but this time with a Delete button. You can select the style you want to delete and click on Delete.

 

I want to also talk about a bug in OneNote that prevented me from including paragraph spacing into this. The dialog shows spacing but it will always be disabled due to this bug. The bug is that OneNote will not tell an add-in about the font information of the text if the text has paragraph spacing applied. This means if you have a piece of text that is styled as Arial 10 red and paragraph spacing: 10 after, 10 before, OneNote will tell me the spacing info but not the font info. In fact it will tell me that the text is Calibri 11 automatic color. This makes things worse when you apply a style to part of a page, because add-in has to write back the whole page when you apply a style and if you have text with paragraph spacing they will be reverted back to Calibri 11. You may hit this if you are using paragraph spacing or if you copied content that has spacing from somewhere else to OneNote, so don't be surprised. If applying a custom style doesn't do what you expect it to do, just let me know and we can identify where the problem is.

 

One final note is that I did not make use of progress bars in this feature to cover the reading and updating page, as I did in image crop and rotate features, as I expect this to be used in pages that contain mostly text and in that case the operations are quick enough. Let me know if you hit any performance problems.

 

Well this is all for now, enjoy the new features. They are results of hard work and I tried to make them easy to use, functional, flexible and pleasing. Thanks go to everyone who gave me ideas and feedback.

Comments

Feb 02
2012

Update for Onetastic:

Pin to Desktop, Improvements, Bug Fixes

An update for Onetastic add-in is available with new features, improvements and bug fixes. You heard it right: bugs. We already have bugs. Software without bugs would be so boring, right? Anyway, if you already have Onetastic installed, you should get an "Update Available" button on your ribbon under Onetastic group which will take you directly to the download page. And here is the new stuff:

 

Pin to Desktop

Last week Daniel Escapa sent an e-mail to a group of people in the team saying:

"I just was thinking about someone wanting to create a powertoy which pins the currently viewed page to the desktop. Might be a fun little project for someone."

This was a nice idea, I replied back:

"This can be added to Onetastic."

This had similar intentions with a request that came from the very first commentator on this web site, Ben:

"I've wanted a 'favorites' bar in onenote for years. We have gigantic volumes of onenote documents here across many notebooks and it is painful to search through. I have many common pages I go to and a favorites bar would be awesome."

 

So here it is; a button on the ribbon that will create a shortcut to the current page on your desktop. Double clicking the shortcut will open up OneNote and navigate to that page. A favorites bar could be the next step on this feature. What do you think?

 

Crop for printouts

Crop feature introduced by the earlier update worked only on images, and not printout pages. Several people asked for it, and it just needed some extra work to handle printout pages. It is now available.

 

Performance improvements

Crop/Rotate and Cleanup Printout features can take a long time based on how much content you have on the page. For reference my home computer which is pretty fast, required 28 seconds to rotate a page from a 12 page printout. Rotating an equal size regular image, using OneNote's built-in rotate function, which is not available on printouts, is instantaneous. This is an unfortunate result of the combination of OneNote add-in model, where an add-in can only request the whole page content, not just the selected portion of it, as well as a couple of performance bugs in OneNote. But that wasn't all. Onetastic was also not optimal, or at least could work around some of the issues caused by the model. I made some changes to avoid doing some of the processing and the result was much better, though not instantaneous. The same test (rotate a page of 12 page printout) now takes half the time, about 14 seconds. Of course all these will depend on your hardware, but let me know if you notice any difference.

 

To improve this experience a little further, I added progress indicators on these long operations, from which you can even cancel it if you change your mind and don't want to wait.

 

Rotated printout images on the web

You can store your OneNote notebooks on SkyDrive or SharePoint and access from multiple computers, smart phones and even through a browser using the OneNote web application. Printout pages on OneNote have underlying XPS documents to allow high fidelity vector based rendering even if you zoom into them, however to make it easy for other clients to render these pages, OneNote also keeps a raster based image. OneNote web application would use this raster based image to render the page. Onetastic used to only rotate the vector based image and not update the raster based one. This allowed rotation to be observed in OneNote 2010, but if you were to go to the OneNote web application on SkyDrive or SharePoint, you would see the page still in the original orientation. With this update, these web images will also be rotated (or flipped or cropped).

 

Crash on missing image size

Malte Ahrens reported that trying to crop an image that you copied from a web site may crash Onetastic. This happened when the web site did not specify a size for the image and Onetastic would expect to see a size on it. This is now fixed.

 

Weird crop result when aspect ratio is not original

I found this issue while trying to crop an image, which I resized only vertically, so the aspect ratio was not the same as original any more. Crop would end up doing something really weird, you can try before upgrading if you want to see what it did. This is also fixed with this update.

 

OCR on rotated printout pages and cropped images

OneNote runs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images so that you can search the text in the image. Once it runs OCR it stores the information as to where the text is on the image. When printout pages are rotated by Onetastic this information was not cleared, so a search on the text on a rotated printout page would show the old location of the text on the image, which is the location prior to the rotation. Now it is clearing this information so that OneNote will re-process it and correct the data. This was also an issue with cropped images and is now fixed.

 

OneCalendar crash

User dirmansyah reported a crash in OneCalendar that is observed when "Run Single Instance" is checked and OneCalendar is launched from Onetastic. The standalone version did not have the issue. This should now be fixed. OneCalendar will not auto update for this as the standalone version is fine. This was a bit late for this release but I was able to fit it in.

 

RSS Feed

Finally an update for the site, I added an RSS feed if you want to follow updates through that. The URL is: http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/rss. You can find the RSS icon at the end of the top menu.

 

If you find any issues, bugs or if you have any feedback, please use the comments form below.

Comments

Jan 22
2012

Update for OneCalendar:

Settings, Keyboard shortcuts, Go to Today

New features are available for OneCalendar. If you already have it installed either as standalone or as part of Onetastic, you don't need to do anything. It will update itself when you run it next time. This will be the first test of the built-in upgrade mechanism so let me know if things don't work as expected. As to the new features, there are plenty, some small some big. Ideas for them came from people who use it, so it is important for you to give feedback as that is the primary driver for any update. I also updated the OneCalendar page with the new features so if you want to see old and new features together as a whole, you can do so there.

 

New screen to manage bunch of settings for OneCalendar

To access the settings screen click on the gear icon at the bottom right. You will also notice that the view selector (month/week/day) is moved to this location. Clicking on the gear icon will take you to the new screen below: The settings you can configure here are:

• Font size:

  This was available on the main screen before, now is under settings here. You can also use the shortcut for it on the main window, more on this below.

• Notebooks

  : You can choose which notebooks are to be displayed in OneCalendar. If you want to see all your notebooks, just click on All Notebooks. If you want to pick and choose, then click on Selected Notebooks and then choose the notebooks below.

• Show Pages On

  : Some people like the way OneCalendar displays the pages on both created date and last modified date. I am one of them. However some others told me that they want it only on created date, and some others only on last modified date. This is easy to provide, so I put an option to choose whether you want them in created date or last modified date or both.

• Single instance

  : OneCalendar will create a new window every time you start it. If you are using OneCalendar from Onetastic, then this might create several windows. If you want OneCalendar to use the same window every time, then you can specify it here.

You can leave the Settings screen by using the back button at the top or the Escape or Backspace buttons.

 

Full week and day info on the title area and title bar

OneCalendar title area used to show the month you are viewing, e.g. January 2012, even if you are on the week or day view. Now it will show the week or day you are viewing, e.g. 22 - 28 January 2012, or 22 January 2012. This info will also show in the title bar so if you don't hide window captions in your taskbar you can see this on the taskbar button for OneCalendar, or use it to differentiate between multiple windows:

Go to a day by clicking on its number

On the month and week view, you can click on a day number to quickly switch to day view and navigate to that day. Previously you would have to switch to day view and then find the day with previous/next buttons as it would switch to some seemingly random day in the month.

 

Keyboard shortcuts for font size, view and navigation

You can now use keyboard shortcuts to change font size (Ctrl+- and Ctrl++), view (Month: Ctrl+1, Week: Ctrl+2, Day: Ctrl+3) and navigation (Ctrl+Left Arrow and Ctrl+Right Arrow). See more below.

 

Go to Today / This Week / This Month

When you are viewing a month, week or day that is not the current month, week or day, you can click on the little button on the bottom left to quickly get back to the current month, week or day. You can also use Ctrl+0 shortcut for this.

Refresh Button

F5 was used previously to refresh the page list from OneNote. You can now also use the Refresh button at the bottom right corner:

 

Enjoy all the new features and let me know about any issues or other comments below.

Comments

Jan 12
2012

The Stubborn Docked Window

If you like to take notes in OneNote while consuming other content on your computer, OneNote has a feature called "Dock to Desktop" to serve you. You can dock your OneNote window to any side of the screen and other windows will not overlap with it. However I've heard from many customers that they are unable to move this docked window to another side of the screen. They get it to the wrong side by mistake and they can't move it back. I tried to explain how this works and how to move it with words, but it was not clear enough for many, and a video, I hope, will explain it clearly. So watch it below for a quick intro on the "docked" mode and how to move the docked OneNote window.

 

Comments

Dec 28
2011

New Feature: Image Crop

Have you ever clipped something from the web or pasted some image in OneNote and realized that it is not quite right? Word, PowerPoint and even Excel enjoys rich picture formatting features, while OneNote is about quickly capturing information and not much about fine detailed presentation of it. Still it wouldn't hurt to be able to crop an image you just captured to reduce the clutter and unwanted content.

 

Well, Onetastic now supports a new context menu item for images: Crop. Just right click on an image and select Crop at the bottom and you will be able to cut it the way you want.

 

 

Finally when you click Accept, your image on the page will be cropped and replaced. If you need to crop it further, you can keep doing so.

 

If you want to learn more about other features of Onetastic, read the earlier post here. If you want to get your hands on the add-in quickly head to the download page.

 

So have you installed Onetastic yet? How was your installation experience? Anybody had any issues? Do you prefer to access OneCalendar as a standalone app or from within OneNote? Are there other features you want to see either in the add-in or OneCalendar? Do you want to hear about how to develop tools for OneNote or my experience going through it? Let me know your comments below and help me improve it.

Comments

Nov 27
2011

What is Onetastic?

Onetastic is an add-in for Microsoft OneNote. It provides additional functionality that is commonly requested. I am developing it at my free time as a hobby. I love OneNote and I work as a developer at Microsoft OneNote team. Although OneNote is fantastic software, we cannot include every piece of functionality in it. In some sense, Onetastic is a way for me to prototype and play with the things that are possible with OneNote. So enjoy additional features and if you want to provide feedback, scroll to the bottom for the comment form or visit the contact page and drop me an e-mail. Check out FAQ page for some troubleshooting help.

 

Features

Onetastic currently has the following features:

• Rotate/flip printout pages

  

  When you print a document to OneNote, sometimes one of the pages needs to be in landscape orientation or you may have forgotten to select "Landscape" for the whole document when to printing. OneNote has a rotate/flip option on images but the same feature was left out for printout pages. Install Onetastic and you can now right click any printout page and rotate or flip it.

• Cleanup printout files

  

  When you delete a page of a multi-page printout, OneNote will display a message at the top of the page that reads: "One or more pages of the Printout below are hidden. To remove this message, delete all pages of the Printout below". This message tries to tell you that the file that backs the printout still contains the pages you deleted, so if you were to share the OneNote page with someone else, they can still extract those pages. However many users including me found the message confusing and there is no way to get rid of it even if you fully understand what it is trying to say. Onetastic provides a button on the ribbon to clean up the backing document for the printout by removing the pages you deleted from the file and remove the message.

• OneCalendar

  

  OneCalendar is a standalone tool that provides a calendar view for OneNote. It displays the pages on the date you created or last modified them. Find more info on the OneCalendar page.

 

Comments

 

Disclaimer

The opinions and views expressed in this website are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Microsoft.