Printing Note to PDF Win 7 vs. OS X

[Wolfboy84 2]

So I was recently introduced to Evernote by my boss, and I'm loving it. There's a bit of a learning curve, but with most software there usually is. I've been using it for my work, my hobbies, and now I'm using it to take notes as the secretary of a couple of groups I'm a part of. I generally take my notes on Windows 7 PC I have with me, sync up and then I'll go home where I have an OS X machine. 

When I'm taking notes on the Windows box, everything looks so crisp and clean and well organized, same story when I go home to my mac. I went to print to a PDF so I could e-mail the meeting notes out to everyone on my Mac at home and the PDF looked just like I expected (WYSIWYG). I had to make a change to the minutes then redo the PDF on my Windows box later and was somewhat horrified to see the PDF generated was massively altered in a Dali-esque way. Text didn't line up with bullet points or check boxes. Underlined text was struck through instead, and tables weren't doing so well either, but it all looked ok on the screen still. Went home and looked on my Mac, and all was well again both on screen and PDF? 

Anyone know what's going on here? I really don't see it being a Windows vs. Mac thing as they both look the same on screen -- it has to be somewhere in the print rendering. Either way I suppose I can note in windows and always make sure to go back to home to print, but what a pain. I absolutely can not turn in something (professionally at least) that looks like an armature with some newsprint, scissors, and a glue stick put together a report -- that much is for sure. 

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong though in my ignorance. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. 

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi. 

9 hours ago, Wolfboy84 said:

When I'm taking notes on the Windows box, everything looks so crisp and clean and well organized, same story when I go home to my mac. I went to print to a PDF so I could e-mail the meeting notes out to everyone on my Mac at home and the PDF looked just like I expected

When did this jump to PDF?  What app do you take notes in on Windows and when/ how do you generate the PDF?

[Wolfboy84 2]

This is when I've taken my notes and go to "print" my notes to a PDF file. You can see the issues in print preview, and the PDF that results from it as well. The software I use to take notes is Evernote; the latest version. 

[DTLow 5,736]

@Wolfboy84   I like your description "altered in a Dali-esque way"

I'd recommend contacting EN support and opening a ticket.    Contact Evernote Support

[Wolfboy84 2]

Thank you very much @DTLow, I'll shoot them a quick note and let you know what they say. 

**Edit: Just submitted a support request -- we'll see what all they say. 

Thank you everyone for kind help and suggestion. 

[Wolfboy84 2]

Hello Everyone, 

So I just wanted to follow up with what I found out -- I meant to do this Tuesday, but the week has somewhat run away from me. 

So I've talked with two consulting experts and here's what I've been taught:

1. There can sometimes be some install issues in the Windows platform where things get the tiniest bit messed up and printing doesn't look quite normal  (In my case especially printing to PDF). In that case there a couple of things that can be tried. 
   1. The consultants recommended first using PDF Creator as the PDF generating software (I had been using Cute PDF)
   2. If the problems still persist they recommended trying to to a complete uninstall and clean reinstall.
      1. Be careful to backup notebooks / notes that are local to your machine
          
2. On the Windows platform this is a known issue when some elements are in your note. (E.g. Checkboxes, Underlines, Bullets etc.) so for now this is something we just have to live with if printing from the Windows platform. He didn't really indicate weather or not this was going to be fixed in future versions or not, but did at least confirm that I'm not just going crazy / messing something up as a new-ish user to this program. 

I will say that in my own investigation in my free time (of which there has been sorrowfully little) it seems to me that when the PDF or note export is being generated inside Evernote, they are doing so with a sort of on the fly HTML generator. This would explain why things like images and text look ok on the screen and not so much when printed. I've taken that a step further and exported a note and begun writing my own test program to "clean up" the generated HTML code so that things print more nicely for me when I'm on my Windows box. This works OK for me since most of what I need to print and distribute in hard copy are templates I've created in Evernote, so my program can look for very repeatable tasks to clean up. 

Anyway that's where I've gotten with my issue, and just thought I'd pass along my findings for those of you who care. Thank you to everyone who helped out, I greatly appreciate it!