show text from multiple notes based on formatting/colors highlighted

[bounce 74]

Say I highlight text blue in multiple notes as a form of tagging text down in notes, does there exist a third-party tool that will let me see all the text from multiple notes (displaying like it's all in a new note) highlighted with that color?

 

 

 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

What platform and EN app are you using?

If you are using EN Mac, then it is possible to extract the text highlighted by the same color using AppleScript.

[bounce 74]

Nice, I am on Mac 6.11.1   I've messed around with applescript a bit, not extensively though. Is it fairly straightforward for EN extraction?

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  To the best of my knowledge and belief - no.  The best work-arounds I can suggest are:  either 1) tag notes containing highlighted text with a keyword for each highlight so that a search by keyword will bring up all the notes that contain potentially useful text;  or 2) create a new note for each subject,  like "blue text" and copy/ paste all the quotes that relate to that subject into the note - with links back to the original full text if that's relevant.  There's nothing I'm aware of that will pull the texts out of their original context and give them to you in one index.

There is a feature in Mediawiki (the software that powers Wikipedia) called 'transclusion' which relates to part or all of one document being linked to another so that if the original is changed,  all the various places where that edited text appears will also automatically be changed. I would imagine that it could be used as you describe,  but you would need to mark the text with a particular code,  and then embed that code somewhere else to see the content.  Although unless you already have an existing wiki set up I wouldn't think its worth commissioning one purely for this purpose - it's too high maintenance.

Edit:  pipped by Mac scripting I see..  which is probably a much better idea! 

[DTLow 5,736]

58 minutes ago, bounce said:

Say I highlight text blue in multiple notes as a form of tagging text down in notes, 

Have you checked the options for highlight colours (yellow)

I'd echo @gazumped, insert a keyword and search for that.  You can even adjust the colour so  it's not visible

 

 

[bounce 74]

6 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Have you checked the options for highlight colours (yellow)

I'd echo @gazumped, insert a keyword and search for that.  You can even adjust the colour so  it's not visible

 

 

Woah, that's true. The other day I was wondering if the highlighting color options were moved/removed, I could have sworn I highlighted with different colors in EN many years ago... could be liquidtext or goodreader on ios I'm thinking of.

I do have some keywords I embed in the text and actually just came to the same conclusion about making them near the color of the background.

I use this method, and just trying to take it a bit further https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/12/11/evernote-and-the-brain-designing-creativity-workflows/  

maybe I should be keeping in mind KISS principles. Cheers guys

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, bounce said:

let me see all the text from multiple notes (displaying like it's all in a new note) highlighted with that color?

I'd use Applescript for this.

This was actually discussed in another discussion and @JMichaelTX posted a script to extract text and generate a note

 

[bounce 74]

@dtlow will do a search, thanks.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

1 hour ago, bounce said:

Nice, I am on Mac 6.11.1   I've messed around with applescript a bit, not extensively though. Is it fairly straightforward for EN extraction?

Generally, use of AppleScript with Evernote is fairly straight forward.  But in this case you will have to deal with the HTML code/content to find the text that is highlighted.  I'd say it is of moderate difficulty, depending on your knowledge/skills of HTML and RegEx.

Getting the HTML content of a Note is easy:
This will put the HTML content of the Note Selected in EN Mac on the clipboard.

Paste the below script into the Script Editor, select one of your notes with highlighting, and then run the script.

tell application "Evernote"
	
	set noteList to selection -- Notes selected by User in UI
	set oNote to item 1 of noteList -- get first Note
	set htmlStr to HTML content of oNote
	
	set the clipboard to htmlStr
	
end tell

Just paste into any text editor to see results.

Finding and extracting the text that is highlighted will take some good RegEx skills.

[bounce 74]

Thank you, Was looking on your github a bit ago, cool to see so many applescript projects related to Evernote. Will give this a try one a try!