Monday
02Feb2009
Forevernote
Monday, February 2, 2009 at 09:44AM
I know Evernote has a lot of fans, but I was trying to move some PDFs out of it today and made an unpleasant discovery. I write to either inform you before you commit too many PDFs to it or in the hope that someone has a workaround.
PDFs are not first-class citizens in Evernote. If you're used to Bare Bones Yojimbo, you should realise (as I did not) that Evernote is different. In Evernote, your PDFs are incorporated into the library as an attachment to a note - not as an object in themselves.
When you want to export a PDF that's embedded in the note as a PDF file, it seems the options are limited. Using Evernote's File > Export menu item results in a proprietary XML file with the PDF attachment Base-64 encoded in the XML.
My workaround was to choose open from the contextual menu that's when right-clicking on the attachment. Once the PDF was open in Preview, I was able to Option-drag the document proxy icon (the icon in the window's title bar) to the Desktop. Unfortunately, that resulted in a file name that appears to be a hashed value, rather than the document's original filename. Anyone got a better workaround for this?
I don't want to hate on Evernote - it has a lot of great features and the sync works really well. However, as a repository for PDF files, its design does not - as far as I know - enable a round-trip into and back out of Evernote.
PDFs are not first-class citizens in Evernote. If you're used to Bare Bones Yojimbo, you should realise (as I did not) that Evernote is different. In Evernote, your PDFs are incorporated into the library as an attachment to a note - not as an object in themselves.
When you want to export a PDF that's embedded in the note as a PDF file, it seems the options are limited. Using Evernote's File > Export menu item results in a proprietary XML file with the PDF attachment Base-64 encoded in the XML.
My workaround was to choose open from the contextual menu that's when right-clicking on the attachment. Once the PDF was open in Preview, I was able to Option-drag the document proxy icon (the icon in the window's title bar) to the Desktop. Unfortunately, that resulted in a file name that appears to be a hashed value, rather than the document's original filename. Anyone got a better workaround for this?
I don't want to hate on Evernote - it has a lot of great features and the sync works really well. However, as a repository for PDF files, its design does not - as far as I know - enable a round-trip into and back out of Evernote.
Reader Comments (5)
If you right click on the PDF you can choose "Save As..." to save the PDF somewhere on disk. It will be bit for bit identical to the one you imported.
On versions of the Mac client >= 1.2.0 when you import a PDF the filename will be preserved, but unfortunately anything imported with an earlier version won't have the filename.
Hope this helps!
Sadly, I mispelled my own name on my previous comment.
You can email yourself the PDF's to get them out. Annoyingly it doesn't keep the name and gives it a numerical meaningless one instead.
I quit Evernote for this very reason. It's my data and I'd like to keep it that way.
I got my PDFs out of Evernote and back into Yojimbo by right clicking and selecting Open With… > Yojimbo. For text notes, I selected a bunch of them and printed to PDF for Yojimbo. I really don't like closed systems, and I am glad I was able to get out before I was in too deep. :\
I'm the same as Jamie. I just couldn't use something that was so locked down. It was handy to get them on the phone or elsewhere, but my MacBook Pro is strapped to my ass most of the time and Spotlight finds stuff just like that. I liked the text recognition, but it's not worth loss of data when I move/they close.
At the end of the day emailing un-original PDFs just isn't good enough.