OneNote Search Highlights Wrong Stuff/Doesn't Recognize Text

studpitcher21 - First of all thank you for posting this and sorry for the trouble.

Here is what is going on: we have a bug in OneNote 2010 (our apologies).  When you print into OneNote we use an XPS technology to know what all of the text is in a printout, this is a mix of OCR and actually knowing what is on the page from the source file.  This helps us have much more accurate search results when you print into OneNote.  We still have the OCR engine for images inserted into OneNote but for printout we use this new XPS technology.

We found that under certain conditions when you insert a printout we will have all of the text in our index however when you search for text we don't highlight the results in the XPS (the printout you see on the page).  So it is crazy you see OneNote say there is a result on the page and you see it move you to that page in the printout however you don't see any yellow!  

What is happening is our x,y coordinate for where the text appears in the XPS is messed up, so we are highlighting something but it is just off the page and not in view in OneNote.  This is our bug.  Thankfully we have this logged (I think found from customers on this answers forum, yes we listen!) and the dev understands the problem and we are testing out a fix.  We hope to have this in a future service pack.

But what about in the meantime?  Thankfully Benoit and some other devs found a workaround which should work well for you or anyone else seeing this problem.  

Workaround:

1. On pages which search isn't working for printout hit Ctrl-A a bunch to select all of the images on the page
2. Scroll up/down to make sure all of the printout images are selected
3. Right-click on a printout and choose the last option "Make text in image searchable" and then choose "Disabled"
4. Right-click again and choose English (or whatever language the printout is)
5. Now OneNote will OCR all of the printouts

Now search should work for you on all of the pages in the printout.  Of course the quality of the printout will help determine how well OCR works but in most cases for printed content it works quite well.

Please let us know if this works for you and again our apologies.

Today we released a non-security update for OneNote 2010, here are the details from the Microsoft Office SE blog:

A non-security update for OneNote 2010 32-bit/64-bit Editions was also released.  This update provides fixes associated with displaying search results, fixes to optical character recognition (OCR), indexing, and displaying of inserted documents.  Additional information can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Update for Microsoft OneNote 2010 (KB2493983). 

Thanks all for your patience - apologies for the delay. By doing this through a public update we can reach a lot more users. Please let us know if you have other concerns/issues!