9 replies to this topic

[savvyed]

I am doing research, mostly from PDFs of articles. I would like to be able to highlight a bit of text in an article and clip it to Evernote, along with the citation of that article. I loaded all the PDFs into Evernote, but there still doesn't seem to be a convenient way to capture text from them into a note with the citation. So, basically, I need something like Webclipper, but for my desktop, or within Evernote. Any suggestions?

Thank you!
Tianna

[Parisie]

What about <win><a>?
But

with the citation.

doesn´t work in this way.
Inside am PDF-file there ist simply nothing what could work as a citation.

[savvyed]

<win><a> doesn't work. It says I don't have anything selected.

I wouldn't mind typing out the citation myself if I could associate it with that file.

[cpchang]

What about copying the selected texts to another place and Win-A it?

[rba999]

While I have not found a way to clip notes from a PDF with Evernote, the 'Freemium' research software Qiqqa does it quite easily (complete with your citation--the software is designed for academic research). Basically you make your notes, highlights, or marks on the pdf in Qiqqa (it is a pdf reader and library manager) and then create a report that contains your notes or highlights, which you can read in Qiqqa and export as an MS Word document.

That being said, if there is a way to do what you asked in Evernote, I too would be interested in learning since that could also come in handy.

[C6REW]

Hi Tianna,

pdf's are a law in their own right. If you have Adobe Acrobat you could select text, but it is not that neat.

GrumpyMonkey will be along later, he selects all of his pdf's but I have never asked him how.

You could of course use the web clipper and select that text that way. But I am guessing you may want to be able to use the text in another document?

Best regards

Chris

[savvyed]

Thanks for the responses! It looks like Qiqqa could be just what I'm looking for!

[GrumpyMonkey]

I am doing research, mostly from PDFs of articles. I would like to be able to highlight a bit of text in an article and clip it to Evernote, along with the citation of that article. I loaded all the PDFs into Evernote, but there still doesn't seem to be a convenient way to capture text from them into a note with the citation. So, basically, I need something like Webclipper, but for my desktop, or within Evernote. Any suggestions?

Thank you!
Tianna

Hi. This is certainly a conundrum. On a small scale, I'd say you'll probably be fine with Qiqqa. I haven't used it myself, but it sounds like it does what you want it to do. Good luck with it!

Personally, I have a much more laborious, manual, and not very ***** [EDIT: S-E-X-Y] system. I have thousands of PDFs in my digital library (scanned books, journal articles, pamphlets, archival materials, etc., etc.), and I have found that on a large scale, it works better (at least for me) to separate PDFs and Evernote (http://discussion.ev...ce/#entry173506). Someday, I hope to have it all in Evernote, but for my particular use case (and some of the hardcore paperless folks out there), we might have to wait until selective sync is available on the desktop clients.

Specifically, what I do is take my PDFs, run them through Automator (a Mac program) to extract all the text, and then I move those text files into Evernote. This makes all of my PDFs searchable, and if I need to read the originals, they have the same file naes, so it is easy to find them in Dropbox (or, more likely on my external drive, because I have several hundred gigabytes of data).

As for citations, I do all of this by hand. It really isn't a big deal (in my experience). I have 26 notes (one for every letter of the alphabet) with the citations in CMS format for footnotes and bibliographies. I copy/paste from here into research papers.

Whenever I take notes on something I read, I create a reading note and link to it from the citation in my bibliography.... Ugh. This is getting long. There is so much more to talk about here! I will stop now. Maybe someday I will post about all of this on my website.

If you want to know more, just ask. I suppose the takeaway here is that there are all sorts of ways to automate the process depending on your research field, source types, computing environment, objectives, etc.

[savvyed]

While I have not found a way to clip notes from a PDF with Evernote, the 'Freemium' research software Qiqqa does it quite easily (complete with your citation--the software is designed for academic research). Basically you make your notes, highlights, or marks on the pdf in Qiqqa (it is a pdf reader and library manager) and then create a report that contains your notes or highlights, which you can read in Qiqqa and export as an MS Word document.

That being said, if there is a way to do what you asked in Evernote, I too would be interested in learning since that could also come in handy.

 

rba999, do you have a referral code I can use when I register?

[rba999]

Hi Savvyed, thanks for asking--my referral code is 62801. Enjoy.

And BTW, in case you're interested, Qiqqa also allows you to search all the pdfs in your library (or libraries) at once (has proven very useful as the focus of my research has shifted).