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The Rightnote UI
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Posted by Jon Polish
Oct 8, 2012 at 12:30 PM
The developer is on vacation and is supposed to return tomorrow, October 9.
Can you tell me the problem you encountered with PDF indexing?
Jon
>WSP wrote:
>>For
>>whatever it’s worth, I should add that I wrote to RightNote
>support twice last
>>Wednesday and have had no reply. I’ve also since then discovered
>a serious bug in
>>RightNote’s indexing of linked PDF files, and since that is what I
>primarily wanted to
>>use it for, my enthusiasm has cooled and I have not bought a
>license after all (as I was
>>almost ready to do).
>>
Posted by WSP
Oct 8, 2012 at 06:26 PM
Jon, what happened is rather mysterious and difficult to describe, but here goes:
I created a new file and linked a couple of dozen PDF files of books. Then I did a series of test searches, and at first I was very pleased with the results. RightNote provided a column of search results, with the search words shown in context and highlighted. But as I was playing around with this, I realized that one of my PDFs was in fact not searchable. I therefore closed RightNote, opened the PDF in PDF-Xchange viewer, and did an OCR of that file. When that was finished, I saved the file and went back to Righnote.
I then discovered that if I searched on any word that happened to appear in the newly-saved PDF, RightNote would no longer show words in context but would show only the file title—and this was true of all other PDF files in which the word appeared. If I searched for a word or phrase that did not appear in that one PDF, then the search results were displayed normally.
I deleted the link to the problem PDF and then relinked it. That did not solve the problem. I rebooted. That didn’t help. I reindexed the RightNote file through the “file cleanup” menu command. It made no difference. I suppose the next step would have been to reinstall RightNote, but I began to lose interest by that point. I concluded that RightNote was buggy and was not worth any further expenditure of effort.
I hope you or someone else will tell me that I am wrong, because I liked what I saw until things went screwy.
Bill
Posted by Jon Polish
Oct 8, 2012 at 08:22 PM
I have no clue. I tried to duplicate what you did and used a scanned document that was OCR’ed. It worked fine. I then used a complex pdf (pictures, tables, columns) that was just short of 20MB. Again, it was fine (but it took a while). I can even see the text of these respective documents (click open text).
I am worried that I might run into problems and not realize it. However, I think the pdf parser used by RightNote is the same as that used successfully by other programs (UR?). Perhaps yours was a one off anomaly. I hope so.
Jon
Posted by WSP
Oct 9, 2012 at 12:37 AM
I did another experiment this evening—very interesting. Once again I created a new file and started linking PDFs, and for a second time I discovered that one of my linked PDFs was not yet searchable. In other words, this was exactly what happened before. But this time I made absolutely certain I had unlinked it, and then after doing the OCR, I relinked it. Everything worked fine.
I assume that what happened last time is that I failed to unlink a file before I ran OCR on it, and that somehow corrupted (permanently) the Rightnote file. I’ll do a few more tests tomorrow, but this is promising because it suggests that the bug—if that’s the right way to describe it—is easily avoidable.
Bill
Posted by Jon Polish
Oct 9, 2012 at 07:06 PM
Thank you Bill. That is encouraging. Please post any additional experiences.
Jon