Significant merge limitation on v10 (windows). Not so for Legacy.

[idoc 400]

So here's something that doesn't seem to work on v10 as it does with Legacy.  I have workflows that require merging hundreds or thousands of pdf files.  For example, I subscribe to the Hellofax virtual fax service which integrates directly into EN.  We get about 1000 faxes every month and these are automatically sent to an Evernote folder as pdf files.  With Legacy I can select all 1000 notes (each of which is a pdf),  right click and choose "save attachments".  This puts all 1000 of the pdf files into a designated folder on my hard drive.  Over there I use Adobe Acrobat to combine them into one big searchable file.  I just did it now for 2400 faxes and it combined into a 50MB file which I can store in Google drive.  I now can delete those 2200 fax pdfs from my EN.   I can no longer do this with v10.  First of all, any combining of notes seems to be limited to 50 notes.  Secondly, the ability to "save attachments" is gone.  Instead, there is a way to combine up to 50 notes such that you can see the pdf files concatenated within, but this is not in a format that you can edit with Acrobat.  This deficiency may be a non-issue to many users but it's become part of my workflow for much more than just combining faxes.  Right now I can't see a work-around to this using v10 and am very concerned as to what would happen if Legacy went away.  As long as Legacy sticks around we can do our house-cleaning with it every few weeks and clear our EN folders of all the pdf files.

[idoc 400]

On a related note: I also noticed that if I want to delete those 2000 notes it's very easy to do so in Legacy ie: just go to Trash, highlight all of them and delete.  This is not possible in v10 where you are forced to do it 50 at a time.  For this reason I can't even imagine trying to delete thousands of notes from the Trash folder (which I do on a regular basis).  

[Jon/t 1,276]

17 minutes ago, idoc said:

On a related note: I also noticed that if I want to delete those 2000 notes it's very easy to do so in Legacy ie: just go to Trash, highlight all of them and delete.  This is not possible in v10 where you are forced to do it 50 at a time.  For this reason I can't even imagine trying to delete thousands of notes from the Trash folder (which I do on a regular basis).  

You can right click the trash can icon and 'Empty Trash' ... might help.

[Boot17 1,441]

There is also an "Empty Trash" button at the top of the Trash list of notes on Desktop:

And on mobile, there are three dots '...' at the top right with an 'Empty trash' action item.

But to the core point of the post:

9 hours ago, idoc said:

This deficiency may be a non-issue to many users but it's become part of my workflow for much more than just combining faxes.  Right now I can't see a work-around to this using v10 and am very concerned as to what would happen if Legacy went away. 

This reminds me of the loss of the Apple Scripting feature which has less a chance of coming back IMO than efficiencies that you are looking for. So I know that some long time EN users that really depend on Apple Scripting are moving on to something else. (One of the 'something else' is Devon Think, but that is MacOS only.)

I'm not sure I'm totally following your work-flow, so this is just a shot in the dark, but could you export the entire notebook -- you right click on the notebook similar to how @Jon/tshowed to empty the trash:

And select to export as a 'Single web page'

This will place all your PDFs (and other attachments) into the local folder that you exported to.

There is no limitation of 50 notes on a folder export and I believe it is pretty efficient to export a single notebook vs trying to select more than 50 notes at a time. (There is an unsupported hack to select more than 50 notes at a time if you still need to do that -- you can search these forums for it.)

 

 

[agsteele 2,942]

6 hours ago, Boot17 said:

There is an unsupported hack to select more than 50 notes at a time if you still need to do that -- you can search these forums for it.

I'm not sure that the configuration tweak will help in the OP's case. There is still a maximum limit of around 1,000 notes after using the tweak whereas @idoctalks of 2,000 notes but I suppose that two batches would be easier than 40.

I think a notebook export would the easiest option of those available. I fear, though, that there isn't a solution for this exact workflow.

[PinkElephant 8,077]

As I understand there is no specific reason to have these faxes send to EN in first place. It may have come as a handy solution, but to merge thousands of pdf documents is not a key competence of EN. That it was possible does not prove it is a must feature.

So why not use other apps ?

Out of my personal experience there is PDFify that has the ability to combine several pdf files into a large new one. This works even in the Free version. On my Mac it is a QuickAction in Finder: Select the PDFs, hit „Create pdf“ on the secondary menu, and they are combined into a single pdf.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

I wasn't aware of the 50-note selection limitation--thanks for flagging it, @idoc. I doubt if I'll need to select or delete >50, but it does seem an arbitrary limitation. Seems like a request worth posting in the Windows Desktop v. 10 requests forum.

Edited May 20, 2022 by Dave-in-Decatur

[PinkElephant 8,077]

It is more or less arbitrary - I think it was introduced to avoid runaway server / client actions when the v10 client got released. Y‘ow, case of a bug leading to a loop.

There is a method to raise the limit - however there seems to be a second cap, at about 1.000 notes. I have not made it around the second one, for the first one I have a routine on the Mac - probably Windows is similar.

There is no restriction on actions for a complete notebook, no matter how many notes.

[idoc 400]

10 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

As I understand there is no specific reason to have these faxes send to EN in first place. It may have come as a handy solution, but to merge thousands of pdf documents is not a key competence of EN. That it was possible does not prove it is a must feature.

So why not use other apps ?

Out of my personal experience there is PDFify that has the ability to combine several pdf files into a large new one. This works even in the Free version. On my Mac it is a QuickAction in Finder: Select the PDFs, hit „Create pdf“ on the secondary menu, and they are combined into a single pdf.

We are not asking EN to merge pdfs.  We use Acrobat to do this but need EN to grant us unfettered access (as does Legacy).  Also, the faxes were just a minor example for explication purposes.  We use this in multiple ways.  For example, my office generates 50-100 client paper forms each day which are all scanned into pdfs and then combined daily, weekly, monthly, annually into larger pdfs.  These are used for searches and are ultimately removed from EN and stored in Google drive annually.  Therefore, every day we are working with hundreds of  pdf files in EN notes.  The 50 merge limitation is not the only one in v10 ie: the pdf files don't open up in the same way, we can't ask v10 to convert every single pdf into an icon instead of messy pages etc.  Legacy was an ideal medium for storing and manipulating pdfs, v10 is not there yet.

Again, these may be  moot issues for most users who do not deal with pdfs as extensively as we do.  We are in an industry that generates a lot of paper and is not yet wholly digitized.  The pdf route was our way of bridging the last century with the present by scanning everything, converting them into pdfs and then manipulating them within EN.  It works great in Legacy but we will need to look at work-arounds and other hacks to make it work in v10.  Other than this limitation I do like v10 and can use it for all other purposes quite nicely.

 

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Basically you have an off-description use case, and were lucky a general purpose app like EN supported it.

You describe a use case for a full fledged DMS document management system - using EN for this in my opinion is not even safe under a compliance perspective.

A DMS has measures documents can’t be changed / falsified after registration. This EN never had. If you get audited (for example by the tax authorities), depending on your location it could be a very expensive „saving“.

[idoc 400]

2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Basically you have an off-description use case, and were lucky a general purpose app like EN supported it.

You describe a use case for a full fledged DMS document management system - using EN for this in my opinion is not even safe under a compliance perspective.

A DMS has measures documents can’t be changed / falsified after registration. This EN never had. If you get audited (for example by the tax authorities), depending on your location it could be a very expensive „saving“.

I don't think so.  I have the right to do whatever I want with pdfs that I generate for my own purposes.  For example, I could annotate a U.S 1040 tax form with a smiley face and various expletives because it's a file that belongs wholly to me and is not being submitted to any authorities.  My pdfs are are there for our own financial and administrative calculations and are 100% personal property. My wife, an attorney, uses a DMS which is full fledged and whose upkeep and maintenance costs the firm $120,000 annually.  This is an entirely different beast.     

[PinkElephant 8,077]

You can host a DMS yourself on a NAS - will cost you the NAS, and the license. Will be less than 1% of what you quoted, and not per year, total investment, to be written off over 4-5 years.

But anyhow: German tax authorities require for a pdf for tax use that the emittent signs it electronically. The signature is interwoven with the pdf it signs - if you change the pdf, the signature does not match anymore. If it is electronically signed, and you merge it with other documents, the signature is destroyed. This renders it useless for tax use.

This means you have to keep the paper and can be required to produce the paper if requested. This is something you can handle for a household, but your description does not sound like household use any more, with hundreds of tax relevant documents per month. For larger quantities, a DMS is required, there the use of filing it as paper is not accepted any more.

In companies of a certain size (not a mom & pop operation, but anybody doing some millions in turnover) it is usually solved by sticking a barcode sticker on each paper that enters the company. It links the document to the corresponding data in the commercial system used to process payments, and is the identifier in the DMS. 

Little excourse - anyhow this is not the use case EN was designed for. EN explicitly says the system may not be used for audited use cases, be it legal profession or HIPPA (medical).

[idoc 400]

You can host a DMS yourself on a NAS - will cost you the NAS, and the license. Will be less than 1% of what you quoted, 

That could work for tech savvy people. In a typical U. S law firm of 50 lawyers and 50 ancillaries you have added costs of equipment they take home to connect to a VPN, special “thin clients” at every workstation at the office, an IT team dedicated mainly to the DMS, monthly license fees etc etc. Actually the 120K was on the low side.  In my own field I have rejected proprietary platforms for much cheaper widely available solutions that I tweak to my specifications or jettison as needed. 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Well, these guys do not only need all that stuff just to read their scanned pdfs.

A notebook to work from home plus a VPN - I wouldn't trust my case to an attorney that runs without a VPN to call "home", even for email. A thin client is a small PC without the GPU to properly run most games (a PC to work on, so to say), again that is what I would expect from any work station for a white collar. Maybe their work really circle around their DMS, probably because it runs the deadline supervision and workload control as well, as the time allocation to cases and clients.

Yes, this can get pretty elaborate, and if I want my stuff to be safeguarded, I think there will be significant IT overhead to carry. But all that stuff EN can't do anyhow, not legacy, not v10.

About the correct observation that v10 is not yet "there" in pdf handling, I think some feedback or support entries might help to promote an improvement.