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(Archived) [feature requests] Custom taxonomies; easier tags management; citation support


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That's quite a handful! Let me explain the logic behind each one.

 

Don't get me wrong, Evernote is a wonderful piece of software, a solid 9/10 in my view. Just that with these additions - at least for me - it would become a 10/10.

 

(1) Custom taxonomies

 

In Evernote, you are just limited to Notebooks and Tags as a means of organization.

 

Since I'm a heavy tags user, I end up having to come up with intricate and not very efficient means of organizing them. 

 

So, I put a $- prefix for document classifications; a q- prefix for note types (e.g. article; image; video; book review; interview; etc); a # prefix for people; a numeric prefix for time classifications; an @ prefix for places; etc, etc. It would be much easier if I could just create separate custom taxonomies of a tag-like form for each of those.

 

This could be made even more effective by enabling different post taxonomies (e.g. for books reviews vs. recipes vs. wine reviews vs. "vanilla" standard notes) and custom meta boxes that could be associated with each post type, but maybe I'm going off the reservation by now.

 

In other words, basically make it like WordPress where creating custom taxonomies (in addition to default Categories and Tags) and custom post types (in addition to Posts and Pages) is quite easy.

 

(2) Easier Tags Management

 

* When you select two tags, you can also choose to show notes that either have an AND relationship or an OR relationship with them. (Current default is AND).

 

* Add combinations of Notebook/Tag to short-cuts (currently you can only add a notebook or a tag individually). But what if I want to only have a shortcut for a particular tag in one particular notebook?

 

* When you select a tag and start scrolling up to take it to its desired parent, the scrolling speed can be frustratingly slow... problem if you've accumulated a hundred or so tags that need to be organized into parents!

 

(3) Reference/citation Support

 

With this one stroke it would basically make Scrivener redundant.

 

Though I'm aware writers are a niche market, nonetheless I don't imagine it would be very hard to implement and the absolute numbers of those who'll benefit (and use the software more!) are large.

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Hi - you're right (of course) to try to keep as closely as possible to your preferred workflow and make the software do what you want it to,  and I largely agree with your suggestions - except...


 


(1) Custom taxonomies - whatever works for you:  but I prefer to rely on 'smart' titles and Evernote's quite extensive search syntax,  and an 'exception' process that works like this.  I do my best to name my notes as comprehensively as follows - [date][note type][content][details].  So: 20131120 - book review - taxonomy for everyone - classifications.  "intitle:book intitle:review" will find just book reviews.  Add a date qualifier to find notes made on a given day/ week/ month..  If I find doing 'real' searches that I get too many hits,  then I'll change titles or add extra tags to differentiate the good hits from the bad ones.  Caveat to that - something like BitQwik is required for advanced searches,  otherwise there's a frustration factor in crafting really intense search queries.


 


(2) Easier Tags Management - amen to that;  what we have is pretty good, but I have a lot of tags and I'd like some help eliminating close duplicates - banks / bankers / banking - and sticking to a consistent plan.


 


(3) Reference/citation Support - there are tools out there that 'do' citations and I don't see anything but unrecovered development costs if Evernote start to include that quite specialised feature in the appplication.  Having said which,  that darn Editor is due a major refurb,  and if they manage to bundle a few new features along the way..


 


So:  +10 points for some interesting suggestions. -100 for that "not hard to implement" comment - nothing's impossible,  but whether it suits Evernote's game plan or budget is kind've up to them...   ;)


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The tag system *is* a taxonomy. It's your language (or at least a vocabulary, since syntax is somewhat lacking) to create. The richness comes when combining tags for me, rather than inventing fancy suffix/prefix/hyphenated tags, but that's open as well. Overlapping tag names (i.e., tags that have multiple meanings) are fine with me, in fact, they help to cut down the number of tags that I need. In general, I don't worry too much about organizing tags (I intentionally do not have a lot of tags), and rarely use the tag tree (left panel in Windows client): the more complicated stuff that you create, the more stuff you need to remember.

I seem to recall that there was a way to click-select tags (maybe by holding down the Shift key?) that did an OR search (as opposed to an AND search), but that may be a figment. Th WIndows client does make it pretty easy to change from one style to the other; it's just a dropdown menu on the search explanation control.

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personally, i find comfort in the parent/child hierarchy of organization which is not currently supported by evernote.

its extremely difficult to verbalize what's in my head but the end result would be the ability to present a "report" that can flow through a category...

 

Design:

Design:Typeface:

Design:Typeface:SansSerif

Design:Typeface:Serif

Design:Color:

Design:Color:Color Theory

Design:Color:Schemes

 

it would explain why i prefer the nested folders organizational system on my computer versus straight tagging.

tagging (and displaying the results of all tagged) can be cumbersome if there are many instances but i suppose that could be mitigated by more effective naming...

 

anyway, thanks for the anxiety!!!!!!!!!

:)

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Design:

Design:Typeface:

Design:Typeface:SansSerif

Design:Typeface:Serif

Design:Color:

Design:Color:Color Theory

Design:Color:Schemes

You can build tag names like this (I think that using '-' or '.' rather than ':' as a separator would probably work better in Evernote, though I haven't tried using ':'). The cool thing about such tags is that they encode a hierarchy in their names, and this can be exploited in search (e.g. tag:Design-Typeface-* should return all notes that have tags with a prefix of "Design-Typeface-"), and this is actually one of the only scenarios where you can make mixed AND/OR searches. The downside: long tag names, awkward to reorganize hierarchy.
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For starters, i clipped a screenshot of my tags list and then OCR'ed the PDF. I copy/pasted the results into excel, did some text-to-columning, some concatenating and then copied that list into OmniOutliner. i added a column where i can indicate if i'm adding a Tag and will now try and organize into some sort of master list. the joys of obsessive compulsive behaviour

 

 

 

You can build tag names like this (I think that using '-' or '.' rather than ':' as a separator would probably work better in Evernote, though I haven't tried using ':'). The cool thing about such tags is that they encode a hierarchy in their names, and this can be exploited in search (e.g. tag:Design-Typeface-* should return all notes that have tags with a prefix of "Design-Typeface-"), and this is actually one of the only scenarios where you can make mixed AND/OR searches. The downside: long tag names, awkward to reorganize hierarchy.

 

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