(Archived) HOWTO: Search PDF annotations

[The Eye That Eats 0]

I just signed up to Evernote Premium and am disappointed to find that it does not seem to index (or even allow me to read) the many Annotations I have in my PDFs. While the OCR seems fine (although that the file cap is 50Mb, and the OCR cap is 25Mb is a source of annoyance), all of the things I'm really interested in searching are in the Annotations, which just appear as "flat" inaccessible speech bubbles.

Am I doing it wrong? I'd have thought this was a fairly important feature.

Thanks for your help

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I'm just guessing, but it looks like Evernote does not index PDF annotations.

I hadn't thought about that before, so thanks for point it out.

As a work-around, you could copy/export your annotations, and paste them as text in the same note as the PDF.

[The Eye That Eats 0]

Hmm, the annotations are my anchors to the page locations of the relevant content (some are 90 pages long), so they really need to be on the page they are referencing. How possible is it that this feature would be implemented in future?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I just signed up to Evernote Premium and am disappointed to find that it does not seem to index (or even allow me to read) the many Annotations I have in my PDFs. While the OCR seems fine (although that the file cap is 50Mb, and the OCR cap is 25Mb is a source of annoyance), all of the things I'm really interested in searching are in the Annotations, which just appear as "flat" inaccessible speech bubbles.

Am I doing it wrong? I'd have thought this was a fairly important feature.

Thanks for your help

Hello. Welcome to the forums!

Evernote does index annotations. It works both for comments typed directly onto the PDF and those typed into comment boxes. I have not tried handwriting to see if that gets indexed, but I think that would not work well, if it works at all, since the received wisdom is that Evernote does best with handwriting in image files. Could you be more specific about the process from start to finish so that we could figure out where it is going wrong?

There is a 50 mb cap per upload. I do not know what you are referring to with the 25 mb cap on OCR. I am not sure what that means. At any rate, I know of two options for gettting large files into Evernote: splitting the files (Adobe Pro works well for this, but there are other applications available) and optimizing the files (depending on the file, you can have some significant reductions). In both cases, I recommend saving the original file separately on your hard drive just in case.

Personally, I follow JM's method. If I annotate, I export the notes separately and paste them into the note with the annotated PDF. More commonly, though, I simply take my notes in a separate file from the start. This has the added benefit of creating a readable reading note (I tend to write more explicitly, produce more of a narrative, and put in page numbers) that I can reference later without needing to open up the original PDF. In fact, I am doing this right now

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Evernote does index annotations. It works both for comments typed directly onto the PDF and those typed into comment boxes.

GM, this does not seem to work for me. Running the new EN Mac 3.1.0 Beta 2 on Lion.

I have a PDF with "Invoice/Receipt" typed into a comments text box.

When I enter any part of, or the entire, text of "Invoice/Receipt", it does NOT find the Note with this PDF.

Any suggestions on how to make this work?

Also, I can't figure out how to export the annotations/comments, even though I made that suggestion.

I'm using Adobe Acrobat Pro 10 Mac.

Suggestions?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Very interesting. I was searching PDFs using the iPad and it worked... I think I originally did all the annotations using the iPad, so maybe that is it. And, I wonder if the Mac can find my iPad annotations. Gotta test all o fthis.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@GM: Just to state the obvious, be sure that the comment text is NOT contained within the PDF normal text when you run the search test on the Mac.

I started to say that I would be shocked if the EN iPad search worked on PDF comments but the EN Mac did not.

But we have has so many problems with EN Search in general, that nothing would surprise me at this point.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

@GM: Just to state the obvious, be sure that the comment text is NOT contained within the PDF normal text when you run the search test on the Mac.

I started to say that I would be shocked if the EN iPad search worked on PDF comments but the EN Mac did not.

But we have has so many problems with EN Search in general, that nothing would surprise me at this point.

LOL. Indeed. It was not. It was a gibberish word I loaded in order to test something else (long story).

At any rate, I am currently suspecting our workflows differ, and the "annotations" done by iPad apps (the vast majority of mine) are different than those done by the Mac. I think this is more likely than Evernote indexing but only being able to find a word in one platform. In other words, Evernote may not recognize the way Adobe does "annotations," but does recognize the way iPad apps do. I'll try and find time for testing.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

In other words, Evernote may not recognize the way Adobe does "annotations," but does recognize the way iPad apps do. I'll try and find time for testing.

This I would find surprising, because:

1. Adobe is the owner of, and had defined, the PDF spec which includes annotations/comments.
   
2. Adobe Acrobat is much more likely to follow the spec than 3rd party PDF apps.
   
3. EN Mac was design/built before EN iPad.
   
4. Seems like with the first few EN iPad versions, EN iPad did not even show annotations/comments.
   

But, maybe I'll be surprised.