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(Archived) Mac beta - PDFs?


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Thank you for the invitation.

I'm using the Mac beta and tried to drag in a PDF of some of my research, but the only thing that showed up in the notebook was the full filename. Since I'm new to Evernote, I'm assuming I'm missing something. How do I bring PDFs into Evernote for the Mac?

Any help is appreciated.

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I haven't tried on the Mac yet, but if it's like the previous windows builds... you can't. As you noticed, you get a file link, not the package itself. That said, if you need to get info out of the PDF, you could:

1. Select all, copy and then paste the info into Evernote. This will only work for certain types of PDF's however.

2. Show the full page of the PDF in PREVIEW, then use the EN clipper to clip the page into EN as an image.

David

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Thanks for the reply, David.

Unfortunately, I was/am looking at Evernote to deal with my GBs worth of research, many of which are PDFs - some OCR'd, some not - so the page-by-page solution would be impractical.

Is the lack of PDF support new to version 3?

Is the new version primarily aimed at gathering info-bits from the web?

I'm starting to wonder if I'm the target audience for this app. Still, I need to investigate it more before I make any decision.

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EN has never been a file management tool. You could drag a pdf to EN and get a link back to that file, but there would be no copy made of the pdf, nor would the data in the pdf be brought into EN. On the other hand, if you drag a txt file, you can get the contents of the file.

Elsewhere on the forum there are discussions about using EN with pdfs, i.e., to get the recognition working. But it's not really a great marriage. The best anyone has ever come up with is to either (a) take a snapshot of each pdf page and put that into EN, or (:( grab all the text of the pdf and bring that in. Neither are very useful.

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Elsewhere on the forum there are discussions about using EN with pdfs, i.e., to get the recognition working. But it's not really a great marriage. The best anyone has ever come up with is to either (a) take a snapshot of each pdf page and put that into EN, or (:) grab all the text of the pdf and bring that in. Neither are very useful.

I was able to convert a 15-page PDF containing scanned notes to JPG images with very little effort using Adobe Acrobat. To do this, I loaded the PDF, and then did a "save as" JPG - and 15 discrete JPG files were saved - including any Adobe markups. I was able to then drag these into Windows EN which indexed them like it would any other scanned image.

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Does anyone know of a way to convert multi page .PDFs into large .JPGs on a Mac ? If I use Automator to convert the documents, I only get a single page. If I convert them to a multi page .TIF, I still only get one page after importing even though the original .TIF is multi pages.

I currently have around 50% of my documents which a multi page .PDFs, and I want to try and get these into the EverNote beta.

I know I can save the individual pages as .JPGs, but I want to keep my scanned notes pages togther.

Thanks.

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Does anyone know of a way to convert multi page .PDFs into large .JPGs on a Mac ? ... I know I can save the individual pages as .JPGs, but I want to keep my scanned notes pages togther.

You could group multiple pages into an EN "notebook". But it sounds like you want a multi-page PDF to convert into a single long image, correct?

I'm not a Mac guy, so I don't what tools are available. There may be a tool that you could use to "Print" the multi-page PDF to a single long image. Something like Snag-it in the Windows world might do this by creating a virtual printer. Would be a neat work-around. Let me know if you find something.

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I've found a program called GraphicConverter (from http://www.lemkesoft.com/index.html) which seems to split a .PDF (or multiples if you use is into batch mode) into multiple .JPG files each with the original filename then a 3 digit sequential number at the end. Seems to be about £20 (UK price). I've got the trial down and will do some more testing tomorrow when I'll let it run about 100 multi page .PDF files that've I've been collating.

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...split a .PDF (or multiples if you use is into batch mode) into multiple .JPG files each with the original filename then a 3 digit sequential number at the end...

The "multi-page pdf to multiple images" feature comes with Adobe Acrobat - at lease in Windows Version 8 Pro.

- Load the multi-page PDF in Adobe Acrobat

- Menu: File, Save As

- Drop down box: Save As Type: select JPG

- Images will be created in the same folder as the PDF with the following extension in place of PDF: *_Page_1.jpg

Then you can load the images into EN, group into a Notebook, and then Index.

Good luck.

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GraphicConverter does the job great on a Mac. The Mac is my main platorm, but I've yet to move to Leopard to use EverNote for the Mac, so I'm using the Windows version in a Parallels session just fine.

I guess the next step is to move across to Leopard then!!! I won't need the Windows version then.

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I've got hundreds of personal docs already in Yep, but the thing that is exciting about EverNote is the ability to search the text, rather than the tags. I won't need to thing about tagging now!!!

If only EverNote would read .PDFs or Yep would read the scanned document text!!!

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Thanks, wifinetguy. Currently, I use Devonthink Pro Office for my PDFs and it does a fair job of it (I have a lot of them, which is why the conversion process needed for Evernote just doesn't cut it for me). I index my PDFs in DTPO, so I can use both the search capabilities of DTPO and Spotlight. True, DTPO hasn't had a major update in a long time (though it has had small incremental updates).

I think what nikjones was referring to is the feature of Evernote that can search text in an image - without there being a text layer. It's my understanding that Yep and the others like it (including, I believe, DTPO) need the text layer in the PDF to search it. I could be wrong about that. I haven't looked at Yep for quite a while, so I'll go see how it's faring.

Since I didn't realize that Evernote can't store PDFs, I, too, was hoping that Evernote would be able to search my PDFs that haven't been OCR'd. Alas. Maybe in the future. I'll certainly keep my eye out for it.

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Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. I can search on text in the PDF. Not just the tags.

Does that also include documents that have been scanned to .PDF ? I currently scan all my paper work before I drag it into my Yep folder, then I tag all the new documents in Yep. I've looked at the website, but it doesn't seem to do that unless I'm missing something obvious ?

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Thanks, wifinetguy. Currently, I use Devonthink Pro Office for my PDFs and it does a fair job of it (I have a lot of them, which is why the conversion process needed for Evernote just doesn't cut it for me).

It might be worth checking out the GraphicConvertor software to see if that might fill your requirements. If you run it in batch mode, it just creates loads of new .JPGs from all your .PDFs. It would be nice if EverNote supported .PDFs though!!!

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WritingStudio & nikjones,

I goofed a little. You guys are absolutely right about docs scanned into .pdf files. I was successfully searching PDFs that were native. After posting my earlier post, I scanned in a few documents that created PDFs but was not able to search for any text in those. My apologies. I spoke too soon.

I also agree that it would be great if EN supported PDFs. I'll be waiting on that, as well. I don't see much use over Leap, except that I can get it from any computer. Not enough for me to change.

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Hi wifinetguy, I was just panicing that I'd missed a major feature in Yep that I would defiantly use. I've got all my personal docs tagged in Yep - so moving from Yep to EverNote isn't a major problem for me, as all the tags are normally would appear in the scanned .PDF file. The converting would take about 10 mins for importing into EverNote, and the indexing would take a little bit longer.

I'm looking into EverNote for all my work paperwork. I've scanned in about 200-250 sets of documents (manuals, printouts, meeting notes etc) for either product. EverNote has the edge though ATM due to the word recognition.

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