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Am I just dumb, or is RightNote total rubbish?
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Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 17, 2014 at 12:42 PM
“Am I just dumb, or is RightNote total rubbish?” - Well, if you ask this way, my answer is: Yes.
Until now, I have only used RN for importing notes from Evernote (see the thread I opened a few weeks ago). As the project, I need RN for, is delayed, I haven’t dug deeper into RN. Importing worked (apart from a glitch that I could easily “repair” - RN does not import notebooks with umlauts in the name) - so for me RN is no rubbish at all.
So, a more precise answer to your question is: I don’t know (re dumb), and: No (re rubbish).
Franz
Posted by WSP
Jan 17, 2014 at 01:00 PM
Dr. Andus, thanks for the suggestions, but I use PDF-Xchange daily and have tried Agent Ransack in the past. Both of them do the job more or less, but they are rather slow because of the lack of indexing. Despite our grumbling about RightNote, searching through a big stack of PDFs is one thing it does extremely well—and even elegantly.
Bill
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 17, 2014 at 01:06 PM
WSP wrote:
>less, but they are rather slow because of the lack of indexing.
Have you tried Copernic Desktop? It does do indexing, the search is quicker, and there are some options to search in specific folders, file types etc., and you’ll see the search term in context.
Posted by WSP
Jan 17, 2014 at 01:45 PM
Thanks again. I’ll look into it.
Bill
Posted by 22111
Jan 17, 2014 at 08:34 PM
1)
Bill (wsp),
I even had been tempted to give that advice given here, without being asked, then withheld it, since I don’t know X1 (x1.com) well enough, and it’s not a real elegant solution. Here, Copernic Desktop (Cop) has been mentioned, instead of X1; Lookeen (lookeen.net) should be a third solution (and perhaps the best one (?) if you also use OL (Outlook): Lookeen was THE OL “specialist”, and is deemed to provide the best search in OL, whilst Cop is deemed so-so, and X1 seems to have trouble with OL (but if you do NOT use Outlook, X1 could be your best choice within this context here since for anything besides OL, it seems to be better than Cop, from what I’ve read on the web).
Do NOT overlook Lookeen (in case you use OL) since now it’s a more-or-less full-grown desktop search engine, i.e. also for Word, Excel, etc, and pdf.
Since you’ve got all your pdf’s there, you should trial all 3 programs (and perhaps more, but dtsearch is so expensive… ;-) )... and expose your experience with each… ;-)
From X1’s marketing: “X1 Professional Client is a desktop search application that is specifically designed to work with Outlook.” - this leaves me doubtful, since people report probs with OL, and in fact, that was the reason I did not (yet) buy X1… (using OL myself)
Btw, there doesn’t seem to be very active development neither with Cop nor with X1, so compatibility probs could remain, instead of being overcome…
2)
Bill, if I understand your problem well, it’s caused by MI’s inability to do what you now do with RN; both UR and TB do it (attention, only UR Prof might do that, and it’s only some weeks ago they had their annual bits offering), though, but I’ll not try to make you switch to either of them; none of them is that good, in other respects, so you’d not switch anyway, and you’d be right to stay with MI, especially since Petko’s new data format might change this non-processing of pdf’s.
Or in other words: Today, he would be crazy to buy some add-in for that function; he’s got better things to do; but if he doesn’t buy such a pdf component after having changed his db format, well, that would be inexcusable since that new format (SQLight? does he say anything about WHAT it will be?) will be MI’s format for a very long time, so a minimum of investment (such a component should cost him about 500 bucks) should be possible.
3)
Bill, “I use PDF-Xchange daily and have tried Agent Ransack in the past. Both of them do the job more or less, but they are rather slow because of the lack of indexing”. AG/File Locator Light/or even the paid version doesn’t do indexing, and for a bunch of pdf’s, that’s not beautiful. But there are SOME pdf tools that DO indexing, e.g. the one from Nuance (which does as much bona fide customer checking as does Directory Opus, some people call it a nightmare); I even looked them all up but none of them is below 100 bucks or so, it’s regularly the “superior” versions. I could look again into it if you want to trial them (some weeks ago somebody here had promised to share his experience with Chaos Intellect without doing so then, but that definitely wasn’t you! ;-) )
From all of what I now, Acrobat is awful for your purpose. Hence, again, my “advice” (= that’s what I’d do) to trial all 3 progs mentioned in 2) above, all the more so since I do NOT see any real advantage of those “indexing pdf progs” here in 3) over X1 (if that works well with pdf’s) since every such pdf prog is mainly for editing purposes and such, and you simply need perfect search, then display, and I didn’t find any pdf prog specially made (and optimized) for that task.
4)
Bill, some Boolean (!) search within pdf (UR, TB, and X1, etc. should all offer that, whilst RN does not, because of its apparent bug) is one task; might “clones” of those pdf files within several sub-folders be another, additional task, being worthwile? Or some tagging? Some tagging by coding in the file names? That’s two questions, and the answer to the second one might depend on the answer to the first one: IF you’ve got several sub-folders, THEN both cloning and “tagging” / file name coding could be a good thing; if that was not your choice, you will certainly not judge it worthwile to add tagging/name codings now.
IF some of this could be of interest, let’s discuss this in a new thread: There is “Search Everything”, or some file managers which are better than others… (And “cloning”) of files into different sub-folders could be done by a 1-key ahk command.)
5)
Franz, EN import is the ONLY useful import that RN offers; if you want to import anything else, from other outliners, possibilities are so few that you’ll end up writing a script that does it by the clipboard.
My question was indeed a rhetorical one, but in that sense I wasn’t entirely sure if RN really was so “dumb”, or if it was I who didn’t grasp HOW to do it, for those missing elements there.
Since you use RN, please have a look into it, perhaps my assertions are partly wrong, and then I’d be happy to hear about how to find that missing functionality.
But if I’m right, it would be high noon for the developer to see into it.
6)
From my discussing multiple tagging above, and then the need to filter by multiple tags again, here in the RN context, it occurred to my that yes, I had been perfectly right when discussing tags vs. outlines some weeks ago here, and some months ago here, but for the only (and very important) context I had had in mind there: Whenever you have “material”, “reference material”, “work” and such, then, yes, and I “proved” it there, (rather flat) outlining is highly superior to tagging.
But here above I discussed tagging for “db’s” with highly standardized content, my example was a customer db. And here, in such “uniform content” data bodies, a tagging system is as good as an outlined system, or even better.
I think it’s very pleasant to have an outline for your very first criterion, but I say “pleasant”, not “useful”, because I acknowledge that within such “uniform db”, it’s quite arbitrary which criterion will be your very first one, replicated within the tree: In the above example, the tree would have been by geography, but it could have been by customer “size” / “potential” / “industry”, and many more, so a tag-only system (or an outright classic db) would be as good it seems.
All the more so since then, for your second criterion down, you’ll need either clones=virtual parents or tagging anyway.
Let’s clarify one misconception here, though: Cloning = assigning an element to a virtual parent / stepparent is NOT necessarily more cumbersome than tagging, it’s just the execution of the cloning functionality that is often rather cumbersome (but which could be straightened out by an external macro).
BUT then, you assign one customer to perhaps 8 such virtual parents, from perhaps 60, and so you’ll have 60 such sub-headings in your tree, every one with its respective virtual children, but NONE with any criteria combination, and THAT would be of interest in real life, most of the time, so the practical interest of such multiple cloning of standard data items is highly doubtful, i.e. must be considered inexistent.
Hence the “advantage” of a tagging system for such tasks: It’s simply much more elegant (and here again, assigning standard tags must be a “1-click” (or 2-click, in reality, but neither 5-clicks nor mouse moves) thing):
Most of the time, you’ll search for tag combis, and within a tree system, that means searching (or the special search for tag combis you can do in MI, its best feature, and I said this years ago; the only problem, to GET there, since regular filtering in MI will NOT filter for combinations - but the functionality is there, albeit highly cumbersome), and you will almost never open and check those virtual parents.
So, tags / standard db’s are preferable indeed, for standardized information, whilst the outliner concept is the superior one for heteroclite data.
(Some could say, that message is not new, but it seems worthwile to have dissected why outliners are superior in many cases, even when finding out that they are not superior in all cases. So here again, it’s looking after the right tool for the right task, but most outliner-vs.-tagging discussion is about tagging ostensibly superior for both kinds of tags, which is wrong though, and I could even add, taggin is FAR inferior for heteroclite data, whilst outlining is just a little bit inferior for unified data, but that might come as aggressive. ;-) )