I take notes in Goodnotes, using folders to organize notes. Nevertheless, it has become difficult to manage with numerous documents. I am trying different ways to integrate what i have in Goodnotes with Devonthink. I was thinking of exporting the pdf to Dropbox and indexing the Dropbox file in Devonthink. I was hoping that could produce some “dynamic” file which Devonthink could structure it its folder system which is much more sophisticated than Goodnotes. Unfortunately I am getting into lots of problems . Has anyone achieved some integration with Goodnote and Devonthink.
I use various editors and always export completed notes to Devonthink for storage/organization
I don’t use the editor app for storage/organization
How did you export directly from goodnotes to devonthink… were you using the ipad application or mac
Just using IPad app and the pdf export function; supports a share to the Devonthink app
Hi,
This setup seems close to yours. Do you have Hazel? Maybe it could be used for the organization that you want?
Best regards,
Björn
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This is not a solution as far as I can tell. The backup for Goodnotes when it exports it is in a zip file and dt cannot work with the zip file
Hi,
I get them as pdf-files. But maybe this is different in GoodNotes 6?
Best regards,
Björn
Hi again,
I just checked in GoodNotes 6 on my iPad. You can set the file format of the backup to pdf.
Best regards,
Björn
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yes, it is in pdf format ( as compared to pdf+goodnotes), but still in a zipped file which makes it inaccessible to dt
So unzip it?
Hi,
I’m not sure what you mean by zipped. Do you mean Flattened PDF? On my system the pdf-files are there in DT and can be read and searched (if they are written in English). If you have written in another language you need to download language packs in GoodNotes so they can be OCR:ed. Not every language is available.
Best regards,
Björn
You also need to enable the text recognition in GoodNotes.
Best regards,
Björn
I am using Goodnotes 6 and I do flatten them in pdf format when I try to export them. However as a backup and export they come out in a zip format. I can then unzip them and then try to get dt to read the unzipped file which would contain flattened notes. This will require a new unzipped file after each use of Goodnotes which is cumbersome. I think It will also result in duplicate fies in DT as it imports the new unzipped file. I think I might have to go back to Goodnotes 5 if that backsup files in pdf, unzipped . I am assuming that the file will be read by DT at that time, indexed or imported and no duplicates created .
Hi,
I think that you will get it to work if you check your settings in GoodNotes. Try Cloud&Backup > Automatic Backup. Here you can set Dropbox as your cloud storage and pdf as the file format. Index the destination folder in DT.
Best regards,
Björn
Bjorn,
I am trying it out as you suggested and it seems that it is working. I am sure I tried it before but I must have missed something. Is there a difference if it is done using manual backup or automatic backup… Are the backups incremental, like only new and modified notes backed up and indexed or imported into dt or is the backup of everything. And with each backup , does DT create duplicates or only indexes or imports the modified files. Thanks for you help. I see you are familiar with integrating the two programs. I was so desperate to find a way to integrate dt with note taking that I started experimenting with Notability
Hi again,
I’m happy to help! Glad that it seems to be working for you. I’m not sure if there is a difference between manual backup or automatic backup. The backup works incrementally. I’m think the files are overwritten and then replaced during the indexing.
Best regards,
Björn
I think that’s how it works (though this is actually a question for GoodNotes, not the DT forum). I’ve had automatic backups running for a year or two now for GoodNotes, saving files to Dropbox as PDFs, and haven’t had any issues.
I will note however that you should have a think about whether you will choose to leave PDFs indexed or import them into DT. I tend to manually move mine depending on my work.
Remember as well that you can do a manual export of specific pages in GoodNotes - there is no need to index/import an entire notebook to DT. This is particularly relevant if you need to store a couple of pages on a specific topic, or if like me you have a generic notebook that you just use for catching things quickly and occasionally need to retain the pages.
As a final note of caution, do not re-run OCR on the PDFs in DT - GoodNotes OCR engine seems to have been specifically edited to support their handwritten magic, and DT cannot improve on it (I know because I’ve done direct comparisons to see which gave best results).
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Yes, most of this workflow depends on GoodNotes.
Interesting note on the ocr which i didnt yet try… What still remains a question is folders created in Goodnotes and how the backup scheme outlined affects DT. And vice versa, when i organize notes in DT creating folders, how does that affect Goodnotes or the backup file .
d
I use goodnotes to record notes at meetings or ideas , using the pen input. I also capture articles, random research from various web searches. They are fundamentally disorganized and using DT I can easily group the info. I gather lots of stuff for various court cases or research on many topics and extract stuff that I read… so classification in goodnotes is not good enough… so once in DT through the indexing of the backup, I can organize it all and then have it synched to DTTG
I am not sure which way works better, indexing or downloading onto DT from the goodnotes backup file. Can you describe your experience in that regard ?