change structure of .data/pdf - folder

Hi,

I use X4 on a Windows7 system. In my library, I have a lot of pdfs attached and use the relative link feature. I find this feature useful, but only if you manage your pdfs exclusively through Endnote. The structure of the .data/pdf folder is not useful if I want to access my pdfs through the Windows Explorer, because each pdf is saved in its own folder. Is it possible to change the structure of the data-folder? Preferably, I would want have all pdfs saved in a single folder. Currently I work with two copies of each pdf-file, but, of course, keeping thousands of duplicate files is not what I want.

Thanks

Chris

You can’t change the relative data-folder structure.  You can only attach them via the absolute mechanism (which means you can’t use the “find full text (FFT)” route to retrieve them in the first place, but I assume if you are keeping two copyies, that you need to retrieve them separately anyway?).  This is a setting in preferences, URLs and Links.  (but if you read the caveate there, it points out that FFT still copies to the relative postition. 

Hi Leanne,

thanks for the reply. Actually, I would prefer to get rid of the duplicates and keep only one copy. My pdfs contain quite a lot of comments; because I usually use Endnote to manage my pdfs, the files in .data/pdf - folder are the ones that I’d like to keep. However, as I said, I find the folder structure not useful in those cases in which I need to manage my pdfs in the Explorer.

As I see it now, there is no easy, useful solution: I want to keep the files in the .data/pdf-folder, but don’t want to store them in the designated folder system. Thus, I would need to transfer these files manually in a new folder, change the settings to “absolute links” and then re-link all files to my library entries, right? (ignoring that I actually prefer the possibilities of the “relative link” mechanism, albeit not the file struture).

Thanks anyway

Chris

That is pretty much the way you have to work I guess.  The only thing that can be automated is to convert Absolute to Relative, but not the otherway around.  At least the more recent mechanims do make subfolders which have a somewhat meaningful name as opposed ot the old system fo random numbers (although I hate that there are so many layers of subfolders/files which double the file name structure.  Also you do have the option of annotating in x5, although I myself also prefer using other annotation programs like Acrobat. I do often go in and edit files in the relative folders directly.