Please clarify: is a searchable pdf still searchable on local?

[cavgirl 0]

Hi,

I'm starting a research project and have managed to secure several sources as PDFs of typescript. I uploaded them to Evernote and the servers did their magic and my PDFs were searchable- I'm a premium subscriber, btw. I then proceeded to highlight them. Fine to a point- everything started to grind, regardless of whether I was on my iPad or rMBP. Then I started getting messages about reaching my note limit, despite the fact that my pdf was still well under 100mb. What's with that?! I did a quick search and read that a pdf that has been made searchable remains searchable even when the note is moved to a local notebook, AND this would remove the 100mb nag screen that's been driving me up the wall. Only it didn't work. I'm not getting hits for terms I know are in that pdf and which were found in that pdf previously. What am I doing wrong? Have I misunderstood? Also, how do you navigate between search term matches in the note? I have poor eyesight, I don't want to be squinting for a little box. Is there a way to switch between?

I have to say I'm disappointed. I've used evernote casually for some time and with great success, but now that I want to use it professionally it really seems to be creaking. Granted, part of it may be Mavericks- I was getting so frustrated with EN I tried my old copy of Devonthink Pro (re downloaded, re installed) and it was even worse!

[anjoschu 67]

It seems implausible to me that highlighting text in PDFs would increase their file size like that.

 

What is the original size of the PDF(s) in the note? Are you using Skitch or a different tool for annotation/highlighting? I didn't know that you could highlight text which has been recognized by Evernote's PDF OCR engine (I thought the text would just be part of the metadata for searching, but not added to the PDFs themselves).

 

You state that Evernote gives you a 100MB note size limit warning. What note size does Evernote show if you click the i (info) button in the toolbar above the note? What is the displayed total size of the attached PDF(s) in the note? Has this changed after annotating with respect to their original size?

 

Addendum:

As for using Evernote casually vs. professionally: There are a lot of heavy Evernote users on this forum. It's probably not a question of casual vs. professional use, but of the specifics (that's why I'm asking these detailed questions).

 

I for one have used Evernote in almost exactly the same use case as you describe, just maybe with some other technical details:

1. Scanned & OCR'd a bunch (4 PDFs, ca. 150 pages total) of course materials to PDF with ScanSnap, put them in one single note, together with some other 6 PDFs (an additional ca. 250 pages)

2. Annotated/highlighted the details in most of the PDFs using GoodReader for iPad.

3. Added additional text excerpts etc. to the note.

--> Total note size 25.3 MB

 

P.S.: This sounds a typical use case for GrumpyMonkey. I wonder how you can mention someone on this forum so that they get a notification..? Something like an Evernote Bat Signal. ;-)

[gazumped 11,661]

@anjoschu - you could always PM Grumpy from his profile page;  click on his name and choose 'send me a message'.

 

However.  I think you're on the right track - we all use highlighting and commenting at various levels and (AFAIK) there's no error messages or huge files.  Lets wait for the OP to provide some more information and see if that holds a clue..

[cavgirl 0]

Initially I was annotating a file of @ 10mb within Evernote itself on my iPad. That works ok for the occasional bit of marking- to clarify, I'm drawing a line beside interesting points rather than highlighting the actual text itself- but I ran into the issue where evernote crashed if I tried to do multiple markings, and if you save every time then you lose your place and it is S L O W.

Fine, I thought, maybe it would be better to do the markup elsewhere and re-import into evernote. On the first version of the file I tried I had it in and out of various apps ( good reader, skitch, pdfexpert) and attributed the ginormous file size to that. So I tried again, this time wholly within good reader, then importing. Same problem. Having said that, I shouldn't have been getting the size error in any case because the files in question were never any larger than 60mb, although that still seems too large for a pdf with a few lines drawn on it! Oh, and it's one note per pdf, I'm not combining them all. H'mm, that file size for a single pdf containing scans of around 200 typescript pages does seem a bit much.... Just checked the file sizes of the imported but as yet unmarked PDFs, and they're all a more reasonable 5 - 20mb. I downloaded the PDFs from an online repository, btw, I didn't scan and OCR them myself.

Is any of that any help?

[anjoschu 67]

Thanks for the additional info.

 

This is strange on several levels -- a 5-20MB file growing to 60MB and in addition Evernote claiming that the note exceeds 100MB.

 

I'm not familiar with typescript and cannot assess whether the PDFs being typescript pages is relevant to the problem (I'm not sure if this refers to the text contents of the PDFs or the technology with which they have been created -- but then again, in the latter case, you probably wouldn't call them "scans of typescript pages" I guess...).

 

To be honest, I've not used Evernote's build-in PDF annotation functionality a lot, so I just ran a quick test drawing 8 vertical lines on two PDF pages. This increased the file size from 395KB to 404KB. Adding 4 additional lines added another 1KB. This averages to maybe about 0.8KB per line, or, assuming 5 lines per page, 4KB per page. Extrapolating to 200 pages leads us to 800KB, which is way way lower than the 40MB+ you described.

 

Very odd. I'm kind of at a loss here. Maybe there's something quirky going on with the note. Did you try saving the PDF to your file system, trashing the note, and creating a new, fresh note in which to add your PDF?

 

Sorry that I'm not of much help here. Maybe Evernote support can help?

[cavgirl 0]

Typescript: pages created with a typewriter which were then digitised through scanning. There does seem to be a certain built in OCR, as it were, as Preview was able to do a certain amount with the original downloaded documents. Only it crashed. Thank you, Apple. I did try saving and deleting and re importing and that does seem to work- but it's irritating in that I am then unable to modify the pdf any further, either within evernote itself or anywhere else without repeating the delete/reimport workflow. I'll try again with a different pdf and see what happens; if it continues to be problematic I will contact support because this is just silly.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi cavgirl. I see my name in this thread, but I don't know how much use I can be, as I generally avoid putting PDFs into Evernote

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=127

I think you have a few issues here we need to examine.

1. Do PDFs annotated within Evernote grow larger in size?

2. Is the OCR for a PDF in a synced notebook the same after it is moved to a local one?

3. Does a single change to a PDF mean the entire thing has to be re-uploaded?

4. What's wrong with Preview?

Could you send me a copy of the PDF you are working with (a link would be fine if it is downloaded)? Just tap my name to PM me. Alternatively, share a link to your note. This will help me to better answer numbers 1-2.

In my experience, making any change to any attachment (PDF or otherwise) requires you to re-upload the entire thing. Perhaps annotating it from within Evernote will be different, but I doubt it. This is a limitation of the service, as far as I know.

Preview doesn't OCR, as far as I know, but let's see what is happening. If this is the same as the file you're sending me for 1-2, then I can play around with it. Otherwise, please send me a copy (or a note link) so that I can see what is happening on my end.

[dbellaz 2]

Hi,

I'm starting a research project and have managed to secure several sources as PDFs of typescript. I uploaded them to Evernote and the servers did their magic and my PDFs were searchable- I'm a premium subscriber, btw. I then proceeded to highlight them. Fine to a point- everything started to grind, regardless of whether I was on my iPad or rMBP. Then I started getting messages about reaching my note limit, despite the fact that my pdf was still well under 100mb. What's with that?! I did a quick search and read that a pdf that has been made searchable remains searchable even when the note is moved to a local notebook, AND this would remove the 100mb nag screen that's been driving me up the wall. Only it didn't work. I'm not getting hits for terms I know are in that pdf and which were found in that pdf previously. What am I doing wrong? Have I misunderstood? Also, how do you navigate between search term matches in the note? I have poor eyesight, I don't want to be squinting for a little box. Is there a way to switch between?

I have to say I'm disappointed. I've used evernote casually for some time and with great success, but now that I want to use it professionally it really seems to be creaking. Granted, part of it may be Mavericks- I was getting so frustrated with EN I tried my old copy of Devonthink Pro (re downloaded, re installed) and it was even worse!

Hi cavgirl,

 

You might try compressing the PDF (outside of EN) and resaving after you make the annotations.  Try

[dbellaz 2]

I think my earlier note trunkated. Try http://compress.smallpdf.com to "shrink" your pdf and resave into EN.

 

- Doug

[gazumped 11,661]

Thanks for the tip,  though I see the process uses 144 DPI resolution - if you're expecting Evernote to OCR the document this may or may not be sufficient.  I'd recommend some tests before going flat out with this solution.

 

It's not a cheap option,  but I found Adobe 9.0 local OCR is a fabulous way to smallify scanned files - they're basically graphics files,  and Adobe seems to replace 400 DPI graphics with ASCII text characters which means a 10-50% reduction in size.

 

Weirdness over typed text characters though is something else again.