unifying relative, absolute and old URL links

EndNote EndNote How To
1

I have about 20 endnote libraries with 200 to several thousand references each.  I started using links to pdf files with older versions of Endnote prior to the “attach file” command.

Also, when I started using version X1, my current version (actually X1.0.1) I didn’t know about relative links and many of my files are relative, some are absolute and the earlier ones are linked using the URL function.

OK… I would like some suggestions as to how to get these all back into some reasonable uniform arrangement.  When using the URL approach I had created defacto absolute links and have most of each library’s documents in a single folder.  I seem to like that approach better although I can see the benefits of relative links (I just don’t like all those subfolders).

(Also, the relative links approach seems to make me end up with duplicates of everything since I download to one folder and then endnote makes a copy of that when I create the attachement - when relative links are activated. )

Additional problem: Many of my PDF documents are edited with my underlinings, and commentswhich I don’t want to lose!

I realize that I am going to have to do a fair bit of this manually, gradually.  But in order to get these into a reasonable arrangement what would you recommend??:wink:

2

In partial answer to my own question…

First one problem is that I may have two versions of the same document in cases where relative links was activated.  But in cases where relative links was set then my editing would have been placed on the relative link version of the paper.  In cases where absolute links was active editings would have gone onto the absolute verson of the paper.

So it SEEMS that I could convert all to relative links and I would not lose any edited / commented versions??  I assume that there would be no overwriteing of files if there were no link to an absolute version of the file?

(Note: any commenting editing is done by opening the file via endnote)

4

Try using “Change text” command to batch-edit your path links to PDF files. It seems working just fine.

Regarding “absolute” vs. “relative” storage preference, my personal choice is absolute, and I don’t archive (compress) my library regularly. My collection of full articles are simply too big (more than 20GB) to duplicate to .data folder with my master library. The big file size comes from my late 90’s work when I scanned in older papers (pre-90’s) with PDF format using auto-sheet feeder, and most of them are more than 20MB.