(Archived) how2 import/view pdf in android tablet / phone evernote

[webcommuner 0]

I recently 'chatted' with EverNote Support - after a 12 minute wait I might add, hardly timely

 

Asked how I could view a pdf document in EverNote. Was told to 'attach' the document in windows, which I did. 

 

However I can not view attachment in EverNOte for Android Tablet (Nexus 7 first version) and DroidX phone

 

Appreciate suggestion how to enable me to be able to view PDF docs on Android powered devices 

[gazumped 11,664]

Have you synced your Windows device to the servers and then synced the Android?  Attaching PDFs works fine for me,  though you need an extra tap to open the PDF - it doesn't display as part of the note however you attach it.

[jefito 5,589]

You need to have a PDF viewer installed on your device. There are several, for example, I have Kingsoft Office, Google's QuickOffice, Amazon Kindle app, Evernote's Skitch application, and something called PDF Document Viewer. These are all on my own 2012 Nexus 7, by the way.

So I see a little 'three dot' menu icon on a PDF file in my note, tap on it, and get a prompt that says "View or Edit the Attachment?". If I click "View", I can choose among the above applications. If I select "Edit", I can choose the PDF Document Viewer, or Kingsoft Office. I pick one, and away I go (I don't think that the PDF Document Viewer app actually lets me edit, though)

On the other hand, if I tap on the PDF attachment, it brings it up in Skitch, where I can annotate it.

[achookang 0]

I am having a sort of similar problem to the original poster. When I try and view a PDF attachment in a note, if I click the main attachment icon (not the three dots) it brings up the internal viewer but the image is blank. If I click the 3 dots then I get to choose from helper apps. I have some other notes that have attached pdfs (shared with me from colleagues) that view properly when you click on the main attachment icon. 

 

The troublesome files (that are generated by me from my scanner) view fine in other situations - ie on the desktop using Adobe acrobat reader etc, and also on the mobile devices if I save the file directly into the device.

 

It is a bit annoying that there is an inconsistency in the internal Evernote viewer - is there something wrong with my scanned PDFs???

 

[update - I have discovered that PDFs generated from black and white scans do not seem to show up in the internal viewer on mobile Evernote, but ones made from greyscale or colour scans show up ok. A bit annoying to have to waste all that storage space and bandwidth to scan in colour/greyscale when the original docs are just B&W letters and suchlike.]

[gazumped 11,664]

I am having a sort of similar problem to the original poster. When I try and view a PDF attachment in a note, if I click the main attachment icon (not the three dots) it brings up the internal viewer but the image is blank. If I click the 3 dots then I get to choose from helper apps. I have some other notes that have attached pdfs (shared with me from colleagues) that view properly when you click on the main attachment icon. 

 

The troublesome files (that are generated by me from my scanner) view fine in other situations - ie on the desktop using Adobe acrobat reader etc, and also on the mobile devices if I save the file directly into the device.

 

It is a bit annoying that there is an inconsistency in the internal Evernote viewer - is there something wrong with my scanned PDFs???

 

[update - I have discovered that PDFs generated from black and white scans do not seem to show up in the internal viewer on mobile Evernote, but ones made from greyscale or colour scans show up ok. A bit annoying to have to waste all that storage space and bandwidth to scan in colour/greyscale when the original docs are just B&W letters and suchlike.]

 

Don't know why 2-colour scans would be handled differently,  but it's a useful observation that they are..  maybe someone in the coding team forgot that such 'old school' scans might still be in use.  In my experience though the extra overhead of a fulll colour scan isn't major - I rarely exceed 1K for single page documents...

[achookang 0]

 

I am having a sort of similar problem to the original poster. When I try and view a PDF attachment in a note, if I click the main attachment icon (not the three dots) it brings up the internal viewer but the image is blank. If I click the 3 dots then I get to choose from helper apps. I have some other notes that have attached pdfs (shared with me from colleagues) that view properly when you click on the main attachment icon. 

 

The troublesome files (that are generated by me from my scanner) view fine in other situations - ie on the desktop using Adobe acrobat reader etc, and also on the mobile devices if I save the file directly into the device.

 

It is a bit annoying that there is an inconsistency in the internal Evernote viewer - is there something wrong with my scanned PDFs???

 

[update - I have discovered that PDFs generated from black and white scans do not seem to show up in the internal viewer on mobile Evernote, but ones made from greyscale or colour scans show up ok. A bit annoying to have to waste all that storage space and bandwidth to scan in colour/greyscale when the original docs are just B&W letters and suchlike.]

 

Don't know why 2-colour scans would be handled differently,  but it's a useful observation that they are..  maybe someone in the coding team forgot that such 'old school' scans might still be in use.  In my experience though the extra overhead of a fulll colour scan isn't major - I rarely exceed 1K for single page documents...

 

 

I have experimented further. It seems that it is something to do with the Black & White scans --> PDF that are generated by my scanner's software.

I was have a Canon MP550 scanner/printer and was using the MP Navigator EX 3.0 software that came with it. Colour (and greyscale) scans generated this way are OK, but black and white ones do not display natively in Evernote. I have experimented with all different resolution settings and it doesn't make a difference.

 

I got a friend to scan some B&W PDFs on their scanner (an Epson, using the provided software) and when I attached them to an Evernote note they displayed OK. Also, I downloaded Foxit PDF reader which can also generate PDFs from a scan and when I made B&W scans using this software they also displayed OK in Evernote.

 

So there must either be some subtle fault in how the Canon software makes its PDFs, or Evernote is not very tolerant of something.

 

 

BTW, can you really scan a single page in decent quality to a file less than 1K??!!  I can hardly believe that. I would love to know how I could do that too! All of mine are a min of about 50K (B&W, 300dpi) Maybe some fancy compression?

I 

[gazumped 11,664]

Ah sorry - typo attack and brain freeze there.  I do get smaller files because I OCR them locally and text content takes up less space than graphics*;  but my 300DPI files go from 50K for a page up to lots more if there are graphics too.

 

* - my file sizes routinely reduce by 20% or so on OCR in Adobe 9