Endnote X1 file attachements error - "This URL(\\) could not be launched"

Thank you all for your kindly help.

It maybe caused by too long name of the PDF file. However, the long name of the PDF was accepted by winXP. And when I insert the PDF file, the endnote accepted this PDF without any warning. But it cannot launch URL to reopen the PDF after I restart the database.

Maybe this can be solved in future?

Message Edited by yizhou on 06-18-2008 05:04 AM

I found the reason now. When insert PDF with long name, sometimes Endnote copies and cuts the file name to “…~1”, but the URL is still using the full name.

Hope this bug can be fixed soon.

Hi, i have the same problem like you

how do you solve it ?

i cannot open all my pdf attachment eventhough the file name is short

im using endnote x1 also, word 2007

i can launch txt, jpg, word, but not pdf, can anybody help me why ?

im using adobe acrobat for viewing pdf file

helppp plzzz

thank you in advance

Hi everyone!

I not sure if this may help but is in option… I got the same problem with file attachments wend I move my library to another computer I can not open the attachment(pdf), after while I see like the endnote data base crate a temporal folder with the extension “.Data” inside that folder hold all are script links and pdf files.

I check the folder on my original library and get back to the one I transfer to another computer and I see that i have a lot of missing files. what I did i copy the missing files and pasted to the new one it works… also i did this on a file server of the company where I work and now every person inside the company can reach the database and pdf files

suerte amigos!:smiley:

Luis  

We’ve just encountered the same problem with EndNote X and Adobe version 7. the Library had been copied accross to an Ipod and copied back. The PDF files could be opened directly, but the “this URL could not be launched” appeared if you tried to open directly from EndNote. The solution was to run a repair on Adobe Acrobat, which you can access from their web site.

Kirsty

Could you please discribe in more detail which update should I install for acrobat 7.0? Thank you very much!

Hello, I have the same problem :

-Endnote X1 on Vista

When I attach a file I can’t re-open it.

I think the problem comes from the link used by Endnote X1 : "\D:…\mydoc.doc "

It consider that my file is on a network drive (" \" ) whereas I use a local drive!

For example when I put the link present in the error message in the run window (start > Run), Vista don’t find it because it is looking on the network (my DNS doesn’t know “D” ) instead of in local !

The good link should be : “D:…\mydoc.doc”

Please if you have any response tell me, because if I can’t use file attachement => I can’t use this tool… :frowning:

Message Edited by samuel on 10-25-2008 04:48 AM

Message Edited by samuel on 10-25-2008 04:48 AM

Message Edited by samuel on 10-25-2008 04:50 AM

Hi,

I have a similar problem Endnote X2.0.1 and Vista. All files attached to the library are moved to the .data folder. However, the .pdf files cannot be opened and the same error message appears. 

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks. 

PS: I am also using Acrobat Reader 9.0. A repair install has been made without any resutls. 

Message Edited by inic on 10-27-2008 07:13 AM

Hello,

This is an issue that can happen with the different Adobe PDF viewing programs.  When you tell EndNote to open a PDF, EndNote tells Windows to open the PDF.  Something about the way the Adobe programs register with Windows how to open the PDF will cause the error.

Currently the only resolution we have besides using a different PDF viewing program, is to create a Windows Batch file to open PDFs using the PDF software of your choice.  While this may seem redundant, it seems to be the only way to have the PDFs open consistently with the Adobe programs. 

  1. Open My Computer and go to the folder where you PDF viewing software was installed.  The goal here to find the exact path and name of the PDF viewing program.  These are the default installation locations for Acrobat Reader 7 and 8:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe

  1. Go to “Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad”.  You would need a line like the following:

start “” “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe” %1

You would need to replace the “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe” with the path to the PDF viewing program you want to use.  Note that this must be in quotes, there is an empty set of quotes between start and the path, and that the line ends with %1

  1. Go to “File > Save As” and set the “Save as type” to “All files”.  Browse to your My Documents folder and save the file the name “PDF_Wrapper.bat”

  2. Open a My Computer Window and go to “Tools > Folder Options”.  Click on “File Types” and select the “PDF” extension.

  3. Click on the “Change” button and then click on “Browse”.  Browse to your My Documents folder, select the file “PDF_Wrapper.bat” click Open and then click OK.  Click Close to close the window.

Browse to a PDF on your computer and double click it to verify that you can still open a PDF.  Then open EndNote and try opening a PDF.  Note that your PDF viewing software may inform you that it is not the default viewer, you would not want to have it be the default viewer.  This may also change the icon that was used for your PDF files.

Hi,

I had the same problem with Endnote and PDF file attachments.  Creating the batch file fixed the problem- thanks!  Only thing was that it took me a while to find the “File Types” because I’m using Windows Vista and it is not under Folder Options  So…

  •  For part (4) - Go to Control Panel > Program >  Default Programs > Associate a file type or protocol with a program and then select “PDF” extension.

elaine

Thank you for your tips, it works ! Even if it’s a little bit dirty…

To conclude, I use this tips for word document. I have no problem with PDF (I use Foxit Reader).

Bye

First of all I am really surprised by EndNote’s incompetence in tech support and offering “half-baked” bug fixes like the “PDF-wrapper” batch file. The auther even acknowledges that this will change the PDF file icons. Is this the official solution? You have to be kidding me.

Here is how I was able to solve the problem on windows Vista:

  • Go to Start Menu / Control Panel (Classic View) / Default Programs / Associate a file type or protocol with a program

  • Scroll down to find the entry for “.pdf” extension.

  • Click on Change Program and select “Adobe Reader” from the list. Even though it is already set as the default program resetting this will fix the registry entry and force it to work properly.

And it works. No wrappers.

Sorry End User, while I agree that the official solution seems cumbersome, the proposal to re-associate through Control Panel PDF’s with Acrobat has not worked for me.  I will just have to try the packaging solution above. 

Actually to save time and pointless meddling with my computer I just uninstalled Acrobat 9. I’m back to Acrobat 7 and my pdf’s will open from Endnote again.  I literally went 2 steps backward to stay in the same place.

I like to name my files with the title which can make them really long.  I copied my library to a flash drive and onto another computer.  The file names had been truncated when I copied the flash drive onto the other computer. 

The path on both computers was the same which made the following solution possible.  Had the base path on the second computer been longer this would not have worked, as the path length was already at its limit.

Since I had some unicode characters, zipping on windows was not possible.  I instead downloaded winrar and archived the library.  I transferred this rar file over to the other computer and used the function “extract to here” as otherwise it complained about the file character limit.,

Two Endnote suggestions seems to arise from this:

  1. There should be more flexibility in specifying the base folder for a reference based on its inputs, something like

[year]_[first author] or whatever (this would be user specified) and perhaps even unique for different styles with a default base style provide.  The default name is really long.  In addition the file name itself should be modifiable as well although this gets tricky with multiple files for the same reference (Perhaps only applied to the first reference).

  1. Since the problem is known, an option should exist to fix all bad links, whereby the library checks if a file exists, and if not does a local search within the directory to find the best match (This is for relative links).  I’m not sure for multiple files if it is possible to always back out the matching short file names or not.  For example in some reference folder you might have the following:

numberDifferent2002.pdf

lightEmittingDiodesSupp.pdf

These might become (I’m not sure about the rules on the name length, so this format might be wrong, although the ~# seems to be consistent)

number~1

lightE~1

From these shorter names it is relatively obvious which ones belong to which.  In this case it seems appropriate for EndNote to switch its links to the shorter paths.  Granted I’m not sure if that is always the case and this is really specific to relative links.  When there is only one file link in a reference folder this matching becomes trivial.

Good luck everyone!

Just in case anyone else has the same problem I had that induced the “This URL… could not be launched.” error …

My problem was associated with some text changes I did when I accidently didn’t choose the field to change. That left the default of “Any Field”, so when I changed all “/” to “;” to tidy up my keywords it also changed the "/"s in the File Attachment fields which broke all the links. It was then fairly straightforward to go back and change the ";"s back to "/"s and get the links working again.

The lesson which I need to learn is to be very careful about using “Change Text” as the default is “Any Field” which can  be deadly as there is no warning.

Thomson: could you put a warning message in the Change Text box when someone tries to do a change without selecting a specific field? Or better: force a selection of field and give an option of “Any Field” but only by selection not default?

Thanks!

That default has bit me as well.  Could you post to suggestions, so the right people see this?

Hello,

I am a student and fairly new to EndNote, but I am having this same problem with EndNoteX3 on a Windows 7 machine. I have tried the batch file work-around and I still get the same error message. I have found that if I clear the attached PDF and reattach it, it works just fine (for now…), but I’m not going to manually reattach the PDFs for >300 articles. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the batch file trick didn’t work, or another method for fixing this problem?

Other interesting factoids that might help:

  1. Not all my EndNote references are doing this, just the vast majority of them

  2. My library is not stored locally on my computer, rather the library and all the PDFs are stored online on DropBox and I have been building this library from my desktop at home and my laptop at school. 

  3. There does not appear to be a correlation between which computer I was using at the time when I created the reference and which ones give an error message when attempting to open the attached PDFs.

Thanks,

-Greg-

Greg,

This is a problem with your Adobe reader my friend. Try to attach an excel file into your endnote for example, when you click on it, it will open. However, a pdf attached file will not. All what you need to do is to 1) reinstall the adobe reader from the internet and 2) make it default by right clicking on any of your pdf files in your pc. After you have done this go to your endnote and click on the attach pdf files, it will open.

Zabi 

I have Windows 7, the batch file protocol worked for me. Except, like Elaine for Vista, I had to go to ;

 Go to Control Panel > Program >  Default Programs > Associate a file type or protocol with a program and then select “PDF” extension.

To make it work. One additional note, perhaps Windows 7 only, was that just following the instructions exactly, plus the one addition I mentioned, missed one thing. After I made the batch file I actually re-associated adobe reader with PDF, and now everything is back to normal. I don’t understand how making the batch file and then re-associating reader changed anything at all. Perhaps that was not the intended method? But it works now, that’s all I wanted!

Thanks for the help MODS and friendlies!