HELP: Export for internally consistent note links

[Chico 0]

I'm having difficulty exporting a group of notes in a folder so that the note links within the notes will point to the exported notes, and not back to the notes within Evernote.

My motivation is that I have created a tree of notes, beginning with a master note, and having note links pointing to other notes, and so on down the tree. This note tree was created for a client project I worked on just to keep my own work organized. The project has been completed, and I would like to provide my research archive to my client organized in the tree as it is in Evernote. This client does not use Evernote, and I would like to provide a self-contained archive to them so they will have no need to access my Evernote account in perpetuity. I believe they use Sharepoint to organize their docs internally. I believe a self-contained html tree would work for them.

I began by moving all relevant notes to a dedicated Evernote notebook and then exporting all notes in that notebook to HTML. I get a folder with all notes as individual .html files along with subfolders containing attachments -- so far so good. But when I open one of the files in a web browser and click on any note link, it tries to open the note in Evernote instead of pointing to the exported .html file in my exported archive. There is an index.html created that has links to all my exported notes, and the note links in this index do point to the exported note .html files; but if I click on a note link within one of my exported note .html files, that note link points back to Evernote, i.e. the export is not self-contained.

I have also exported my notes using the XML export option, which results in one giant 800MB file. If that could somehow be imported to become an html or html-like structure, that would be great, but I can't figure out how to view it, convert it, import it, or otherwise verify that it would be an appropriate self-contained structure.

I've spent hours and hours searching these forums, user guides, and the web to figure this (and XML in general) out, but I'm reaching the end of my twine. Any suggestions anyone could lend would be appreciated.

[Chico 0]

I have worked with technical support to figure out what is going wrong with note links in my export, and we've discovered that nothing is going wrong. Here's the final reply from my correspondence with tech support:

"I do not know the reasoning behind the design of our note links. They are what they are, at the moment. They are not really useful outside of the local application.

However, I do see a very valid point of concern here, and I have filed a ticket with our engineering team in an effort to get this changed in a future release. I do not know if it is designed the way it is now due to technical limitations, but it will be examined again by the engineers. I wish I had a more solid solution for you. Please let me know if you have any additional questions."

So, as it stands in Evernote Mac version 3.1.1, note links in exported notes will point back to the Evernote database. I had expected and hoped that I could export a notebook, all notes therein containing note links only to other notes in the same notebook, so that the resulting HTML files would stand alone and function just as they do within Evernote. Currently, that is not the case, but Evernote is aware of the issue, and I hope they will implement the described behavior in the future.

Note that when one does an HTML export, a top-level index file is created with links to all exported notes. This provides a structure to the export.

I have not had the opportunity to test the export capability on the Windows client, but I expect that the behavior would be the same.

UPDATE: I have now had the opportunity to use the Windows client to do the export, and surprisingly to me it works perfectly. The Windows 7 client allows one to export a flat or hierarchical html database of notes in a folder, and all note links within the exported files point to the other exported notes using relative paths, and not back to the original database.

Two points: first, clearly the Mac client support team is unaware that the Windows client works exactly as I described, otherwise they would have informed me and I could have done several weeks ago what I have now done using the Windows client. So it seems better communication between client teams is in order. Second, I'll look forward to the next Mac client update to see if the exported note link behavior is updated. I hope it was just an oversight and is not a deeper technical difficulty with the Mac OS system that makes it difficult to implement.

[2fifty6 5]

Two points: first, clearly the Mac client support team is unaware that the Windows client works exactly as I described, otherwise they would have informed me and I could have done several weeks ago what I have now done using the Windows client. So it seems better communication between client teams is in order. Second, I'll look forward to the next Mac client update to see if the exported note link behavior is updated. I hope it was just an oversight and is not a deeper technical difficulty with the Mac OS system that makes it difficult to implement.

 

Out of curiosity, any updates on this issue? I found myself wondering about this today, since maintaining link consistency between notes after export could make or break the usefulness of the export if you've relied heavily on such links (as some Evernote gurus suggest).

[Brett B 0]

I'd like to request this as a feature enhancement as well. I was really surprised that upon sharing a note, it didn't convert the internal "evernote:///" URLs to their public "http://" equivalents. It should be a prompt when you export it, asking if you want to share all linked notes as well. So I manually shared all of my subnotes, copied the URLs, and updated the original note to using the external URL instead of the internal one. That solves my problem for sharing it, but now I have a note on my windows client with links that take me to the web. Far from ideal.