Vanveen

On 10/15/2017 at 6:25 PM, BlueLobster said:

I saw this posted on Reddit and it offers a good solution to anchoring to certain parts of a note...

 

It’s nice that Evernote allows you to link other notes together but sometimes you want to link to a certain spot in that note. It doesn’t matter if it's a long note or a short note, there is sometimes a need to find the exact sentence or even word that you need to link to in that note. But Evernote lacks text anchoring so this becomes really hard and makes searching for what you need impossible at times.

I’ve come up with a solution that I’ve been using for a bit now and it works perfectly. It’s so simple that it will work on just about any note program or Operating System as long as it has search.

The idea is simple. You need a string of text that is unique and never repeats, you place that in the place that you want to find again on that note. So all you got to do is search the note with the unique string of text and you’ll be taken to it in the Evernote note.

The problem is that how do you pick the unique string of text? You could keep an index of all the strings you used but that is cumbersome and annoying. It’s important to not repeat any of the used strings or you’ll end up with many results unless you want to do that as a way to group them but then we have tags for that.

So instead I use Epoch or Unix Time for my string anchor. I go to this website… https://www.epochconverter.com/

With Epoch or Unix Time every second, it’s a different number that won’t repeat and it works perfectly for this. I refresh the site to get a new number and I paste the number in the location I want to remember. Then in the current note, I put that time stamp in there and say search to find that note and that location. I’ll add an “a” to the beginning of the time stamp that stands for the anchor so that when I search I don’t get the current note I’m working on and I only get that one single note and it’s location in that note. If you share a computer or a notes program you can do your initials instead of the “a” to make finding your locations easier.

Example of Epoch Time: 1507813587

How I put it in the note that I want to refer back to: (a1507813587)

All I do to find that note again is search “a1507813587” and Evernote search takes me right to that spot in that note.

The great thing is that it works on any program that has search like Apple Notes, Bear, iA Writer, and so on. Even works on the Operating System too if you want to use Spotlight or Windows Search to find that note.

 

 

I love engineers. 
This is a beautiful solution to the wrong problem. You've optimized for solving the "need a unique identifier" problem. Unfortunately, in doing so you have destroyed the non-trivial problem elements, e.g. findability via such metadata as English denotation ("Chapter Two: How To Skin a Horse" is much more findable than "a1507813587").  Do you have a table of contents, ' "Chapter Two: How to Skin a Horse" (1507813587)? ' 

I think the real issue here is that anchor links are fundamental to modern HTML/CSS specifications, involve no custom or elaborate code, presumably would not break the code base, and would be incredibly useful to this product. Or in other words, what's the holdup here? How many points would this take in an Agile environment? At $70 a year, is Zoho or Scrivener a better option?
 

This feature has been requested for the past 5 years, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure why it hasn't been implemented: there is at least one third-party hackaround to do anchor links, and it's clearly an ongoing part of the users' mental workflow model. 

Might be an exercise in futility, but here goes. I want anchor links to an external document. So, for example, I have a long and complex project list. Yes, each project could be composed of numerous individual notes, each "Copy Internal Link"'ed to the main project heading. But I'd rather have a list of projects with two or three subheads. When I click the subhead "Research consulting firms" it would go DIRECTLY to a document entitled "Research" and zip down to the "Consulting Firms I Looked At" heading. This is because it may not be worth my setting up a whole sublist of research notes by category, at least not yet: instead, a big "box" where I could root through a specific request and then ignore it the rest of the time.

This model is frequently encountered in workflow arrangement: see Allen's original 43 folders concept and Tharp's "project boxes," which are uniquely suited to complex, messy, indeterminate projects like creative endeavors (in art or business).