Inserted Printouts Not Searchable?

Q: I printed a bunch of PDFs to Microsoft OneNote 2010 but for some reason OneNote isn't OCR'ing then!  How can I get it to search?

Well, first thing we need to check is that indexing isn't disabled.  In OneNote 2010 go to File | Options | Advanced, scroll way down towards the bottom and make sure that "Disable text recognition in pictures" isn't checked.

Once you've confirmed that it's o.k., then what you're seeing is most likely a known bug in OneNote 2010.  While we wait for a fix (coming soon, I'm sure) there are a couple of workarounds, the best of which is to press CTRL+A to select all of the images on the page (you can skip this if it's just one image), then right-click one of those images and select "Make text in image searchable" from the context menu.  That will launch a dialog box that looks like this:

Select "Disabled".  Yes, I know.

Then right-click and select "Make text in image searchable" again and choose the language you need (English, typically).

That resets the indexing and will cause OneNote to OCR all of the selected images on the page.