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(Archived) HELP: PDF search result highlight is positioned too low


huladaddy

Idea

I have noticed that if I search for text in a pdf, the search results are correctly highlighted in the currently opened note, but when I switch to view the results in other notes, the highlighting is shown about an inch lower than where the search string appears in the pdf.

Sometimes a note containing the search term will only display the few inches of the pdf from the top. The rest of the pdf will simply not show... i.e. you can tell that the document continues, but the rest of it is blank. Scrolling the pdf sometimes gets the whole pdf to display. Clicking in the pdf sometimes gets it to display.

Also, because of the way that Evernote dims the whole pdf except for the found search string, it can make reading the pdf difficult. Is there an easy way to toggle between displaying the pdf dimmed with the search term highlighted, and displaying the pdf undimmed? I know that if I click in the pdf, the dimming will disappear, but how do I toggle back to displaying the highlighted search terms again.

Lastly, has any thought been given to including a count of the number of times the search term occurs in the current note, and providing arrow buttons to allow the user to step through each occurance?

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31 replies to this idea

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So the bug is on our radar. For a little bit of context, the last time we delved into PDF related fixes we sorta tried to do a bunch of things that were easy and obvious. Since this bug is a little hard to reproduce, I'll need to find a reasonable chunk of time for a developer to go in and muck around. It is tempting to just go, "yeah spend some time on it, do what you can" or "just work on it for a bit and see how it goes" and I've certainly done that before. But if I know it is a bigger problem I've learned I need to set aside the proper amount of time to really fix the issue and not just scratch the surface. Plus while they're in there, I would like it if they could do some other PDF fixes (or refactoring if that's needed).

Also, sometimes the PDFs just aren't properly formatted, or they're formatted differently than we expect. Because of the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of PDF generation software that all behave a little differently, it isn't always possible to read/render them the same way. I've been told by people much smarter than me that PDF generation is the easy part and rendering properly is the hard part. One suspicion that I have (albeit unconfirmed) is that these might just be PDFs that are composed in a way that is unexpected and make certain assumptions that we're not able to account for. If that's the case, there might not be much we can do about it.

I appreciate the background as you described it. Helps me understand what is going on behind the scenes. While I wish it was being worked on a little more actively, I understand juggling priorities and resources. I'm a little worried by your last statement. I hope you are able to find a solution.

dlu, I have found your last few posts extremely thoughtful, detailed and therefore helpful. Thanks for that extra effort!

Thanks! Yeah I'm hoping we can fix it (that's always the hope right?).

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  • Level 5*
Take this thread for instance, look at the users who felt compelled to jump to Evernote's defence with comments like "this is a user forum", "this isn't an open source project", "Evernote doesn't publish timelines", "that's how they roll", "we have to leave it up to Evernote", "maybe if your wouldn't have phrased it in a snarky way", etc. In fact, on balance, one might conclude that I was out of line to ask if a bug was being addressed!

You are certainly welcome to voice your opinion and complain about bugs. That's not out of line,not in my book. On the other hand, if your approach is come in and toss some snark around, then it's not unlikely that you might get some back. That you got a fulsome answer from dlu is great -- I always hope for more of that.

Some true things, though:

This is a user forum.

Evernote does not usually publish timelines.

That is how they roll.

And -- in line with dlu's (welcome) post, -- we do need to leave it up to Evernote.

Some of this is more in the realm of explaining Evernote more than defending them, mind -- that's just how it is. But while I sometimes wish for more communication from the actual staff folks, I understand (partly from being on the inside looking out at a user forum for software I wrote), and I'm pretty much OK with it.

And ultimately, I really do hope that bugs get squashed, yours included.

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Hi dlu. Thanks for the response.

As our conduit into the inner workings of Evernote, I was hoping for a more meaningful response from you. I'm not quite sure what to make of it...

My post was an attempt to illustrate to you how the last few updates to the Mac client look to me (and possibly others) in an attempt to give you what I would hope would be seen as valuable feedback (not that MY feedback is valuable, but that all feedback is valuable.)

There have been a number of updates to the Mac client since the bug relating to "mis-highlighted search results within pdfs" was reported here, and the bug still exists. That, by itself, isn't a big deal, but at the same time, effort is being spent a) removing some features we like, and B) adding some features that are getting a lukewarm reception at best.

I'm not sure where we disagree, but I was hoping that you might at least address the bug.

So a couple of things. One, I feel like any new feature we do is more likely to get negative feedback on the forums. The people who love it are likely to go on using it without really posting, while the people who's workflow got changed have the forums as a place to vent. A lot of times I feel like standard response on the forums is, "change it back to how it used to be" or "give us an option to change it back to how it used to be." Which is a legitimate opinion, but something we expect to always have.

Two, sort of the corollary, we're never going to make everyone happy. If you go back to the note info panel redesign, we spent a lot of time getting feedback and making changes. We ended up with the dates visible at first and then fading in the rich text toolbar when you're editing the note body which added a lot to the development time. We basically finished most of the work, then had to tear out and add in a new chunk that had to go through design, coding and QA. Happy to do it that time, but I can't imagine that doing that over and over again is worth it.

Three, we have some other factors to consider. Like our CEO's opinion :) There's also some bigger picture problems we're trying to solve or avoid. Or problems for non-forum posting novice users. Which bring me to...

Four, There's a balance we need to strike, between new users and returning users, between novice users and power users and all sorts of other things. I've seem bad things happen if you lean too far in any one direction. But the forums pretty much only represent power users. So anytime we do some balancing for novice users, we'll see lots of forum activity. So I'm trying to make a judgement call not just on how much the forums like it, but if I'm striking a good balance overall.

Five, sometimes we just disagree. Forum feedback is great, but sometimes we disagree with pieces or even large chunks of it. If we're lucky, we have usability tests or some other data that can help us lean one way or another. But sometimes we need to make a judgement call without too much help. We take a step back and reevaluate, but if at the end of the day we're unconvinced by a forum thread, we gotta do what we think is best. Even if it involves being unpopular in the forums. I don't particularly like it, nor does it happen too often, but sometimes it does.

I'm not saying we always make the right choice, but I'm hoping that helps explain a little without rambling too much or being too repetitive

Thanks dlu. Great response.

I feel compelled to respond to only your first point. I agree that for a new feature, you are more likely to see negative threads pop up than positive threads, for the reasons you provided, BUT, within those negative threads, if indeed there are users who like the new feature, that feature gets defended with equal passion. My sense is that wherever there is discussion, it seems to get input from all sides.

Take this thread for instance, look at the users who felt compelled to jump to Evernote's defence with comments like "this is a user forum", "this isn't an open source project", "Evernote doesn't publish timelines", "that's how they roll", "we have to leave it up to Evernote", "maybe if your wouldn't have phrased it in a snarky way", etc. In fact, on balance, one might conclude that I was out of line to ask if a bug was being addressed!

Now about that bug...

So the bug is on our radar. For a little bit of context, the last time we delved into PDF related fixes we sorta tried to do a bunch of things that were easy and obvious. Since this bug is a little hard to reproduce, I'll need to find a reasonable chunk of time for a developer to go in and muck around. It is tempting to just go, "yeah spend some time on it, do what you can" or "just work on it for a bit and see how it goes" and I've certainly done that before. But if I know it is a bigger problem I've learned I need to set aside the proper amount of time to really fix the issue and not just scratch the surface. Plus while they're in there, I would like it if they could do some other PDF fixes (or refactoring if that's needed).

Also, sometimes the PDFs just aren't properly formatted, or they're formatted differently than we expect. Because of the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of PDF generation software that all behave a little differently, it isn't always possible to read/render them the same way. I've been told by people much smarter than me that PDF generation is the easy part and rendering properly is the hard part. One suspicion that I have (albeit unconfirmed) is that these might just be PDFs that are composed in a way that is unexpected and make certain assumptions that we're not able to account for. If that's the case, there might not be much we can do about it.

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But the forums pretty much only represent power users.

I don't think that's true. How are you defining/thinking about power users, dlu?

Well if you care enough about Evernote to go the forums, know what a forum is, login and then post... you're sorta a power user. You at the very least understand this new fangled internet technology pretty well. I mean you're lightyears ahead of my... uhh friend(s)-who-shall-not-be-named. You're likely to understand the idea of tags, metadata and other things without much help.

Even if we're speaking about power users of Evernote specifically, there are far more posts from people who are looking to optimize Evernote, report bugs on more advanced features, ask detailed questions, etc. There are a few "how do I get started" threads, but I would say they're in the minority.

But you're right, it isn't all super duper I've mastered Evernote and could hold all seminar on it power users. Perhaps I need a new phrase. Experienced users?

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So the bug is on our radar. For a little bit of context, the last time we delved into PDF related fixes we sorta tried to do a bunch of things that were easy and obvious. Since this bug is a little hard to reproduce, I'll need to find a reasonable chunk of time for a developer to go in and muck around. It is tempting to just go, "yeah spend some time on it, do what you can" or "just work on it for a bit and see how it goes" and I've certainly done that before. But if I know it is a bigger problem I've learned I need to set aside the proper amount of time to really fix the issue and not just scratch the surface. Plus while they're in there, I would like it if they could do some other PDF fixes (or refactoring if that's needed).

Also, sometimes the PDFs just aren't properly formatted, or they're formatted differently than we expect. Because of the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of PDF generation software that all behave a little differently, it isn't always possible to read/render them the same way. I've been told by people much smarter than me that PDF generation is the easy part and rendering properly is the hard part. One suspicion that I have (albeit unconfirmed) is that these might just be PDFs that are composed in a way that is unexpected and make certain assumptions that we're not able to account for. If that's the case, there might not be much we can do about it.

I appreciate the background as you described it. Helps me understand what is going on behind the scenes. While I wish it was being worked on a little more actively, I understand juggling priorities and resources. I'm a little worried by your last statement. I hope you are able to find a solution.

dlu, I have found your last few posts extremely thoughtful, detailed and therefore helpful. Thanks for that extra effort!

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  • Level 5*

But the forums pretty much only represent power users.

I don't think that's true. How are you defining/thinking about power users, dlu?

Well if you care enough about Evernote to go the forums, know what a forum is, login and then post... you're sorta a power user. You at the very least understand this new fangled internet technology pretty well. I mean you're lightyears ahead of my... uhh friend(s)-who-shall-not-be-named. You're likely to understand the idea of tags, metadata and other things without much help.

Even if we're speaking about power users of Evernote specifically, there are far more posts from people who are looking to optimize Evernote, report bugs on more advanced features, ask detailed questions, etc. There are a few "how do I get started" threads, but I would say they're in the minority.

But you're right, it isn't all super duper I've mastered Evernote and could hold all seminar on it power users. Perhaps I need a new phrase. Experienced users?

I am not thrilled with the term power users myself, because it implies someone using it in a way others don't, and their opinion doesn't carry much weight, when in fact, oftentimes it just means someone using it a lot.

As a consequence, heavy users (this just sounds bad)/addicts/experienced users come across more "bugs", think about things more (instead of being frustrated or confused by something but lacking the time or interest to think about it), generate ideas for how something might be done better, and post with suggestions.

Sometimes the ideas are not feasible, but I am sure you didn't mean to dismiss this group of users (you have included me in the category before) out of hand.

I did not take your words that way (I know you have been listening, and I see changes being made, especially with bugs), but I could see how some people might read what you said differently.

I don't think it is the term so much as the usage; namely, the potential that the more they post the less their opinion matters.

As for the pdf issue, I am used to it in lots

of applications, including pdfs made by adobe, and I am happy as long as you get me to the right page. In this case, as an experienced user, my opinion may not be representative: I may be giving Evernote a pass on something other users wouldn't :)

Thanka for the detailed response.

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Sometimes the ideas are not feasible, but I am sure you didn't mean to dismiss this group of users (you have included me in the category before) out of hand.

I did not take your words that way (I know you have been listening, and I see changes being made, especially with bugs), but I could see how some people might read what you said differently.

I did read dlu's comments that way initially, but I've gone back and re-read them and seen I was probably being too protective of my interests. That said, I would really appreciate more clarification. Dlu, when you wrote,

Four, There's a balance we need to strike, between new users and returning users, between novice users and power users and all sorts of other things. I've seem bad things happen if you lean too far in any one direction. But the forums pretty much only represent power users. So anytime we do some balancing for novice users, we'll see lots of forum activity. So I'm trying to make a judgement call not just on how much the forums like it, but if I'm striking a good balance overall.

what did you mean? What are some ways you have had to balance competing interests? I think I remember you describing the note info popover as something you (Evernote) thought would help new/light users, perhaps at the expense of users who edit metadata more. Is that what you're referring to? Are there other examples?

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Hi dlu. Thanks for the response.

As our conduit into the inner workings of Evernote, I was hoping for a more meaningful response from you. I'm not quite sure what to make of it...

My post was an attempt to illustrate to you how the last few updates to the Mac client look to me (and possibly others) in an attempt to give you what I would hope would be seen as valuable feedback (not that MY feedback is valuable, but that all feedback is valuable.)

There have been a number of updates to the Mac client since the bug relating to "mis-highlighted search results within pdfs" was reported here, and the bug still exists. That, by itself, isn't a big deal, but at the same time, effort is being spent a) removing some features we like, and B) adding some features that are getting a lukewarm reception at best.

I'm not sure where we disagree, but I was hoping that you might at least address the bug.

So a couple of things. One, I feel like any new feature we do is more likely to get negative feedback on the forums. The people who love it are likely to go on using it without really posting, while the people who's workflow got changed have the forums as a place to vent. A lot of times I feel like standard response on the forums is, "change it back to how it used to be" or "give us an option to change it back to how it used to be." Which is a legitimate opinion, but something we expect to always have.

Two, sort of the corollary, we're never going to make everyone happy. If you go back to the note info panel redesign, we spent a lot of time getting feedback and making changes. We ended up with the dates visible at first and then fading in the rich text toolbar when you're editing the note body which added a lot to the development time. We basically finished most of the work, then had to tear out and add in a new chunk that had to go through design, coding and QA. Happy to do it that time, but I can't imagine that doing that over and over again is worth it.

Three, we have some other factors to consider. Like our CEO's opinion :) There's also some bigger picture problems we're trying to solve or avoid. Or problems for non-forum posting novice users. Which bring me to...

Four, There's a balance we need to strike, between new users and returning users, between novice users and power users and all sorts of other things. I've seem bad things happen if you lean too far in any one direction. But the forums pretty much only represent power users. So anytime we do some balancing for novice users, we'll see lots of forum activity. So I'm trying to make a judgement call not just on how much the forums like it, but if I'm striking a good balance overall.

Five, sometimes we just disagree. Forum feedback is great, but sometimes we disagree with pieces or even large chunks of it. If we're lucky, we have usability tests or some other data that can help us lean one way or another. But sometimes we need to make a judgement call without too much help. We take a step back and reevaluate, but if at the end of the day we're unconvinced by a forum thread, we gotta do what we think is best. Even if it involves being unpopular in the forums. I don't particularly like it, nor does it happen too often, but sometimes it does.

I'm not saying we always make the right choice, but I'm hoping that helps explain a little without rambling too much or being too repetitive

Thanks dlu. Great response.

I feel compelled to respond to only your first point. I agree that for a new feature, you are more likely to see negative threads pop up than positive threads, for the reasons you provided, BUT, within those negative threads, if indeed there are users who like the new feature, that feature gets defended with equal passion. My sense is that wherever there is discussion, it seems to get input from all sides.

Take this thread for instance, look at the users who felt compelled to jump to Evernote's defence with comments like "this is a user forum", "this isn't an open source project", "Evernote doesn't publish timelines", "that's how they roll", "we have to leave it up to Evernote", "maybe if your wouldn't have phrased it in a snarky way", etc. In fact, on balance, one might conclude that I was out of line to ask if a bug was being addressed!

Now about that bug...

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Four, There's a balance we need to strike, between new users and returning users, between novice users and power users and all sorts of other things. I've seem bad things happen if you lean too far in any one direction. But the forums pretty much only represent power users. So anytime we do some balancing for novice users, we'll see lots of forum activity. So I'm trying to make a judgement call not just on how much the forums like it, but if I'm striking a good balance overall.

what did you mean? What are some ways you have had to balance competing interests? I think I remember you describing the note info popover as something you (Evernote) thought would help new/light users, perhaps at the expense of users who edit metadata more. Is that what you're referring to? Are there other examples?

Another example would be keeping the Author field. This one goes way back and happened well before I joined. But the Author field is supposed to be for users who clip articles, PDFs and can put in the Author of the article. If you had Romeo and Juliet in there, you would put in Shakespeare. A number of users used it and I guess enough of them did so we kept that field. However most new users didn't use it or even see it or understand what it was used for. Removing it would have let us clean up some of our database, reduce our costs by a tiny bit and would have made our UI just a bit cleaner. But we compromised in favor of the users who were using it.

Perhaps a better example is the Favorites Bar. Specifically the Notebooks and Tags section of the favorites bar. Having the ability to search for a notebook or a tag is aimed at users who have lots of tags or notebooks. The average number of notebooks per user is surprisingly low (at least surprising to me). So having that functionality really is useful when you have 50+ notebooks and hundreds of tags. Early on someone suggested the idea and we thought it was great.

With the Favorites Bar, we also added in the ability to pin an individual note to it. That helped solve the "How do I pin notes to the top?" issue many users had. That problem came up once you had enough notes where it was easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. Not necessarily power users who asked for it, but people who weren't first time users and were most likely using Evernote regularly.

Hope those examples help

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It's interesting that this is hard to reproduce, unless you mean reproduce with consistent results, it happens nearly all the time for me. Are you collecting PDF files that exhibit this behaviour? I can send you some for sure. Probably dozens. The behaviour is often very weird though. I have one document that I just tested created by Adobe InDesign CS3. When I did a global search in evernote for "plastic", the results were off. Then if I click a document and delete one letter from plastic it recalibrates and is correct. On other documents, this technique did not fix the problem. The one I tested that didn't work was created by GPL Ghostscript.

I can for sure recreate the problem on files I save from Word for Mac to Adobe using the Adobe for Mac PDF plugin (all programs current versions). So, it happens on files created in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Acrobat, and third party Ghostscript. I get that addressing wonky third party PDF creation may be tough, but PDFs created by Adobe software should render some consistency. I echo other's sentiments: this is a pretty big issue.

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DL-

I see this behavior nearly EVERY time I do a search.

Here's why this is important to everybody, from novice to power user (which I am not - I just come on the forum when I am stuck or see a bug):

When a new user does their first couple of searches and sees misplaced highlight boxes, their first thought is it didn't find the right note and subsequently give up finding notes this way, or at least trusting it. The result is perhaps an overuse, relative to the original intent of EN, of notebooks/tags. My habit patterns are definitely affected, as are my wife. This creates more requests and support for you and your staff to accomodate functionality to counter the perceived weaknesses.

Accurate PDF search is core to EN (especially when you are paying extra for ala premium membership) and is one of those things that should work 100% of the time. If it is resolved to be an issue outside of EN's control, fine, but document/disclaim it somewhere please so we know where the company stands.

LL

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Quote from DIU at Evernote:

"Also, sometimes the PDFs just aren't properly formatted, or they're formatted differently than we expect. Because of the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of PDF generation software that all behave a little differently, it isn't always possible to read/render them the same way. I've been told by people much smarter than me that PDF generation is the easy part and rendering properly is the hard part. One suspicion that I have (albeit unconfirmed) is that these might just be PDFs that are composed in a way that is unexpected and make certain assumptions that we're not able to account for. If that's the case, there might not be much we can do about it. "

Im a newbie Premium User here but i'm not liking at all what I'm reading about this problem. Hey I like Evernote for the record but this is very BIG problem and needs to be taken on directly with full force. Accurately searching .PDF files is EVERYTHING and absolutley central to why I think people want to use and implement Evernote. Why create a note and send it into the cloud if you can't accurately find it or a word within it later? That said I'm having the same problem. I search for a word and the highlight box shows up nowhere near the actual location of the word. Not with a .PDF generated from one of the "thousands of generators" out there but with a Scansnap 1500 and the "Scan to Evernote" option provided by Evernote. If Adobe comes up with a similarly priced cloud based product as Evernote there could be in trouble in Evernote-land as the search functions within Adobe (with the same .pdf files) do not exhibit these problems. For DIU to say there "might not not be much we can do about it" well all I can say is that's not exactly how I would want one of my employees to take on a problem so important to so many users AND so close to WHY people like Evernote.

I hope Evernote takes the time to actually read the forums to see how many people are having this problem. It is as several people have described "a deal breaker".

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Quote from DIU at Evernote:

"Also, sometimes the PDFs just aren't properly formatted, or they're formatted differently than we expect. Because of the hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of PDF generation software that all behave a little differently, it isn't always possible to read/render them the same way. I've been told by people much smarter than me that PDF generation is the easy part and rendering properly is the hard part. One suspicion that I have (albeit unconfirmed) is that these might just be PDFs that are composed in a way that is unexpected and make certain assumptions that we're not able to account for. If that's the case, there might not be much we can do about it. "

Im a newbie Premium User here but i'm not liking at all what I'm reading about this problem. Hey I like Evernote for the record but this is very BIG problem and needs to be taken on directly with full force. Accurately searching .PDF files is EVERYTHING and absolutley central to why I think people want to use and implement Evernote. Why create a note and send it into the cloud if you can't accurately find it or a word within it later? That said I'm having the same problem. I search for a word and the highlight box shows up nowhere near the actual location of the word. Not with a .PDF generated from one of the "thousands of generators" out there but with a Scansnap 1500 and the "Scan to Evernote" option provided by Evernote. If Adobe comes up with a similarly priced cloud based product as Evernote there could be in trouble in Evernote-land as the search functions within Adobe (with the same .pdf files) do not exhibit these problems. For DIU to say there "might not not be much we can do about it" well all I can say is that's not exactly how I would want one of my employees to take on a problem so important to so many users AND so close to WHY people like Evernote.

I hope Evernote takes the time to actually read the forums to see how many people are having this problem. It is as several people have described "a deal breaker".

We read pretty much everything on here. I'm not sure why you would suggest that we don't "actually read the forums..."

As far as my previous statement goes, I don't mean to blow off all of the PDF highlighting issues to be impossible. I was trying to give some context as to why it isn't solved yet. I'd like to point out that right before I said "there might not be much we can do about it" I had a long sentence listing out some hypothetical problems that we might not be able to solve. I didn't just throw my hands up and say, "PDF problems? Oh, there might not be much we can do about it."

If Adobe renders the search properly on those PDFs, there's probably some hope, but I honestly can't diagnose the issue and tell you what we're doing differently or why we do it this particular way or if it'll be an easy fix or estimate a timeline, etc.

Is there more work we can do on searching, indexing, highlighting and overall PDF management? Yes, we haven't forgotten about any of these issues.

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dlu,

I use both devonthing and evernote with with the same content. Devonthink always highlights the the correct search strings within pdfs. Most of the time Evernote is not correctly highlighted. I guess this is a bug with Evernote, not how the pdf is formatted.

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Hi dlu. Thanks for the response.

As our conduit into the inner workings of Evernote, I was hoping for a more meaningful response from you. I'm not quite sure what to make of it...

My post was an attempt to illustrate to you how the last few updates to the Mac client look to me (and possibly others) in an attempt to give you what I would hope would be seen as valuable feedback (not that MY feedback is valuable, but that all feedback is valuable.)

There have been a number of updates to the Mac client since the bug relating to "mis-highlighted search results within pdfs" was reported here, and the bug still exists. That, by itself, isn't a big deal, but at the same time, effort is being spent a) removing some features we like, and B) adding some features that are getting a lukewarm reception at best.

I'm not sure where we disagree, but I was hoping that you might at least address the bug.

So a couple of things. One, I feel like any new feature we do is more likely to get negative feedback on the forums. The people who love it are likely to go on using it without really posting, while the people who's workflow got changed have the forums as a place to vent. A lot of times I feel like standard response on the forums is, "change it back to how it used to be" or "give us an option to change it back to how it used to be." Which is a legitimate opinion, but something we expect to always have.

Two, sort of the corollary, we're never going to make everyone happy. If you go back to the note info panel redesign, we spent a lot of time getting feedback and making changes. We ended up with the dates visible at first and then fading in the rich text toolbar when you're editing the note body which added a lot to the development time. We basically finished most of the work, then had to tear out and add in a new chunk that had to go through design, coding and QA. Happy to do it that time, but I can't imagine that doing that over and over again is worth it.

Three, we have some other factors to consider. Like our CEO's opinion :) There's also some bigger picture problems we're trying to solve or avoid. Or problems for non-forum posting novice users. Which bring me to...

Four, There's a balance we need to strike, between new users and returning users, between novice users and power users and all sorts of other things. I've seem bad things happen if you lean too far in any one direction. But the forums pretty much only represent power users. So anytime we do some balancing for novice users, we'll see lots of forum activity. So I'm trying to make a judgement call not just on how much the forums like it, but if I'm striking a good balance overall.

Five, sometimes we just disagree. Forum feedback is great, but sometimes we disagree with pieces or even large chunks of it. If we're lucky, we have usability tests or some other data that can help us lean one way or another. But sometimes we need to make a judgement call without too much help. We take a step back and reevaluate, but if at the end of the day we're unconvinced by a forum thread, we gotta do what we think is best. Even if it involves being unpopular in the forums. I don't particularly like it, nor does it happen too often, but sometimes it does.

I'm not saying we always make the right choice, but I'm hoping that helps explain a little without rambling too much or being too repetitive

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  • Level 5*

It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

Clearly, we disagree

As our conduit into the inner workings of Evernote, I was hoping for a more meaningful response from you. I'm not quite sure what to make of it...

Although dlu is certainly able to speak for himself, it seems pretty clear: he's disagreeing with the assertion that Evernote developers are working in a vacuum just because they don't prioritize things the same way that you think they should. Maybe if you'd phrased it as a real question rather than a snark, he might have been more forthcoming, who knows? As it is, how and why Evernote works is an interesting question, but they just don't tend to give out those details all that much; maybe they'll change that policy someday, again, who knows? What we do know is that Evernote has far more inputs into the process than what goes on in this forum, so trying to guess interest in this or that feature based on participation in this forum is just that, a guess (the CTO, Dave Engberg commented on this awhile back, it's probably still in the forums somewhere).

So yeah, we all want bugs fixed (and they don't seem to mind being reminded about those bugs), and we want new features too, and I think they'll get there some time, but as Grumpy Monkey says, ultimately we have to leave it up to them. It's that way with lots of development companies (the one I work for, for example). Is it optimal for the users? Maybe not, but that's the proposition available here.

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  • Level 5*

i have no idea how things work inside evernote, but if it is anything like my life, some things are projects that have been in the works for a while, and others i just started. to the outside observer, it might seem like i ought to fix the faucets, because they are a known problem, but to be honest, with limited resources, i prefer to focus on doing new and better things. the faucets don't "bug" me enough yet.

as users, we can push and prod, but ultimately we have to leave it up to evernote, which has developers who probably face a lot of competing demands on their time.

it's not an answer, but perhaps helpful speculation.

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So I understand that in the last few betas, this still has not been solved. Why? This is a really annoying bug.

I would have thought that the priority of new releases would be to:

1. squash bugs

2. bring parity to feature set between various clients

3. add new features people are asking for (in-header metadata editing, tags in list view, etc.)

...

98. add features no one is asking for (pop-over editing of metadata, card view, etc.)

99. remove features people like (in-header date editing, thumbnail view, etc.)

It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

Clearly, we disagree

Hi dlu. Thanks for the response.

As our conduit into the inner workings of Evernote, I was hoping for a more meaningful response from you. I'm not quite sure what to make of it...

My post was an attempt to illustrate to you how the last few updates to the Mac client look to me (and possibly others) in an attempt to give you what I would hope would be seen as valuable feedback (not that MY feedback is valuable, but that all feedback is valuable.)

There have been a number of updates to the Mac client since the bug relating to "mis-highlighted search results within pdfs" was reported here, and the bug still exists. That, by itself, isn't a big deal, but at the same time, effort is being spent a) removing some features we like, and B) adding some features that are getting a lukewarm reception at best.

I'm not sure where we disagree, but I was hoping that you might at least address the bug.

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So I understand that in the last few betas, this still has not been solved. Why? This is a really annoying bug.

I would have thought that the priority of new releases would be to:

1. squash bugs

2. bring parity to feature set between various clients

3. add new features people are asking for (in-header metadata editing, tags in list view, etc.)

...

98. add features no one is asking for (pop-over editing of metadata, card view, etc.)

99. remove features people like (in-header date editing, thumbnail view, etc.)

It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

Clearly, we disagree

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It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

Whatever your notions of what release priorities ought to be, they might not be shared by Evernote, at least not in that strict order.

Yeah, thanks. That's my point.

My experience is that developers generally work on what their bosses asked them to work on.

Umm, yeah. Again, that's my point.

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  • Level 5*
It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

Whatever your notions of what release priorities ought to be, they might not be shared by Evernote, at least not in that strict order. My experience is that developers generally work on what their bosses asked them to work on.

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So I understand that in the last few betas, this still has not been solved. Why? This is a really annoying bug.

I would have thought that the priority of new releases would be to:

1. squash bugs

2. bring parity to feature set between various clients

3. add new features people are asking for (in-header metadata editing, tags in list view, etc.)

...

98. add features no one is asking for (pop-over editing of metadata, card view, etc.)

99. remove features people like (in-header date editing, thumbnail view, etc.)

It appears that your developers are working in a vacuum.

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  • Level 5*

Yes, it's a bug, and no, Evernote doesn't typically publish timelines for when problems will get resolved, though they sometimes offer hints as to priority or that they're working on something. That's just how they roll.

TTF.

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  • Level 5*

this is a user forum, Evernote staff do read most posts but don't respond to all.

If you have a bug you should open a support ticket, this won't guarantee you a fix or give you a fix time but it will at least flag the issue to the team.

This isn't an open source project and like many (the vast majority) of private companies there is no public bug list.

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This is a very obvious and glaring bug.

I have been waiting months for this to be fixed before rolling out Evernote within my organisation. Despite searching the forums, I can't find a list of "known bugs" (apparently Evernote will not publish these - wtf?) or any definite indication that Evernote acknowledge the issue.

Pretty much the key reason we use Evernote is to be able to search our notes. If this functionality is not functioning correctly, surely this would be a priority to fix?

Example below: Search on the term 'height' within a PDF:

i-FdHsh5j-L.png

Please, please? advise that this is indeed being worked on.

Lee C

Australia

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Lastly, has any thought been given to including a count of the number of times the search term occurs in the current note, and providing arrow buttons to allow the user to step through each occurance?

I'd also like this to be automatically given by the universal search, but there's a workaround that accomplishes this: Do a universal search for a term. In the first note the search pulls up, do an in-note search (Command+F) for the same term. As you scroll through the notes the universal search has pulled up, the in-note search should re-apply every time, giving you the count in each note and arrow keys to scroll through.

Does that do what you want?

EDIT: What I described above works perfectly for me for text and images, but now that I've done a search just for PDFs, it seems very glitchy: It's not counting right, it's not locating any/all instance of the search term in some PDFs, and the arrow buttons don't work. So I guess what I suggested may not work for PDFs. Does anyone know more about this?

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