Archiving large PDFs for android access

[stagbeetle 1]

Hi,

My aim is to get 100s of old car club magazine & manual PDFs into evernote - the PDFs are a mixture of scans and digital formats - and be able to search for a technical term and find the relevant articles in both windows desktop and my android tablet. So if I'm struggling with a widget I'll want access to any articles, any 'readers letter tips', any diagrams, any references in the technical manuals with a quick way of browsing and selecting the best ones.

The PDFs are all on my desktop, but I want to access the articles on my tablet (ie in the garage).

So far the single PDF option is no good on a tablet (I don't want to download a 50 or 500 page scanned PDF and search within for the article).

I've found I can split PDFs into single page PDFS which may help with search pointing me directly to the right page in android but doesn't help 'browsing' the multiple hits on a tablet without downloading each one. 

I've found I can split PDFs into multiple JPEGs and upload them as a single note but I have so much syncing going on at the moment I haven't seen the results of that. I think the tablet will want to download all images so I'll probably abandon that. It's possible I could change the images to low-res ones? But then I'm not sure how good the OCR will be.

My final test is to import the individual JPGs as individual notes but at 100 pages each I'll make a big impact on the 100K notes limit. 

I can't find much on google but surely 'archiving' and indexing large PDFs is a pretty common aim, is it just the android part which is the stumbling block?

Thanks for any suggestions...

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I would definitely stay with PDFs -- there are just too many issues with storing, searching, reading a large number of images.

One thought is to split the large PDFs into smaller PDFs (I'll call these "sub-PDFs") in a logical way (chapters, sections, topics, etc).  Then create an EN "master note" for each original PDF, with links to the notes with the sub-PDFs.  You could also add keywords to the Note title and/or body to facilitate EN search.

In the master note, you could also include a full TOC, either as a PDF, or as note text.

Finally, I highly recommend that your OCR all scanned PDFs before attaching to Evernote.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.  

[stagbeetle 1]

Thanks.... The problem with organising the PDFs is I've tried that method many times before and never really got very far. I was looking for evernote to do that for me in a much better way... after my experiment with lots of jpegs within one note failed the 'search for this term and show me the right page' I'm coming to the conclusion that it just can't work with large, unorganised PDFs and maybe the only possible solution is to go through each one and organise them.

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

3 minutes ago, stagbeetle said:

The problem with organising the PDFs is I've tried that method many times before and never really got very far.

Why?  It is easy enough to split a PDF document into multiple documents, and attach them to Evernote.

5 minutes ago, stagbeetle said:

I'm coming to the conclusion that it just can't work with large, unorganised PDFs and maybe the only possible solution is to go through each one and organise them.

The limitations are not just from Evernote, but from the Android platform, where you have limited storage and processing power.  So, we, as users, have to recognize the limitations of the tool we are using, and design our data structures and workflow accordingly.  Evernote is a general purpose PIM (Personal Information Manager), and it covers a wide range of data, perhaps not handling any one data type in the most optimum manner.  If you have a lot of large PDFs to manage, perhaps there is another tool that would work better on the Android platform.

[stagbeetle 1]

Why? Because there are hundreds of them (about 900 with 100 more to come to get up to date), and I don't have the interest in reading them and cutting out articles and renaming the files to something meaningful etc. Obviously it's possible but the point was to search for 'left hand cylinder head' or 'fuel pump washer' and get instant access to relevant stuff like I would with, say, long threads in gmail.

The way I envisaged it would happen would be - let's say I have 50 hits in 10 notes, so I select one note titled 'parts manual' and it takes me straight to an image of the PDF page, with 2 options 'turn to next page' or 'find next match'. In android, or a web site, I'd expect the image to be the only thing shown. There used to be technical online manuals which did exactly that. I'd hope the android client pre-downloaded the 'next page' and 'next match' images. I'm not sure I'd ever want the actual PDF on android.

I don't want to knock evernote - I think it's brilliant and I'm using it for lots of more important things - but I think the only reason it's not doing what I want is the software's not there yet, rather than the technology... if it's not coming I'll be disappointed only because I can't get everything onto evernote rather than 'evernote is rubbish'

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

12 minutes ago, stagbeetle said:

but the point was to search for 'left hand cylinder head' or 'fuel pump washer' and get instant access to relevant stuff like I would with, say, long threads in gmail.

The way I envisaged it would happen would be - let's say I have 50 hits in 10 notes, so I select one note titled 'parts manual' and it takes me straight to an image of the PDF page, with 2 options 'turn to next page' or 'find next match'. In android, or a web site, I'd expect the image to be the only thing shown. There used to be technical online manuals which did exactly that.

You sound like a mechanical guy.  If so, then you know the importance of picking the right tool for the job.  While a crescent wrench is handy, flexible, and fits all, it is rarely the best tool for any job.  Evernote is just not designed to work the way you want, like the "online manuals" you mentioned.  We don't know what Evernote will bring next, but I don't see this feature in the near future.  For now, IMO, you are best off looking for another tool that works the way you want.

[stagbeetle 1]

I agree... I shall dump the PDFs in their entirety as an archive and hope i'm pleasantly surprised sometime in the future. 

 

Thanks for your help.