Sonny Software

Thanks for adding one more highlight colour and allowing any colour to be used for underlining.

Previously I had a category problem with highlight colours in that you might want to indicate a) the strength or importance of a passage, and b) whether or not you agreed with it.

I can now separate out ...

FWIW, PDFExpert (macOS) offers to convert an ePub directly to PDF at the point where you try to open the ePub with it. I imagine its iPadOS version might do the same (not tested).


It may work - my advice is just be very wary with a new conversion path at first - I've been a couple of hundred ...

And converters don't always leave a good machine-readable file.


I've found that various converters to pdf, including Calibre's epub > pdf format tool have a dangerous habit of suddenly self-destructing, when all highlighted text in Bookends suddenly turn into garbage characters, which cannot ...

Thanks Jon
There seems to have been some lurking corruption on my original Mac, that was getting carried over with Migration Assistant onto the new Mac, and only then revealing itself in this behaviour.

So I did a factory reset on the new Mac, and didn't uses Migration Assistant (selectively using ...

Jon - I've been working with Apple on this for the last couple of days. We've done a couple of complete reinstalls using Migration Assistant/Timecapsule backups, and tried opening the new Mac in safe mode, along with various other checks, without resolving the problem.

The senior advisor at Apple ...

Thanks for responding Jon


If I understand you correctly, your seeing a problem with the PDFs in iCloud Drive, nothing to do with Bookends per se. Is that correct? If so, could you say a bit more about what you mean by "I just see a few files (different each time I restart the Mac)"?


Not quite ...

Interesting. I wonder if I am encountering a similar issue migrating to a new MacBook Pro, where the iCloud Library contains over 18,000 files.

https://www.sonnysoftware.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6092

I'd appreciate if if anyone with technical expertise resolving this issue could cast an eye on ...

I'm doing an orderly (non-panic situation!) transfer to a new Mac M3 powerbook. I've done it via a fresh full Time Capsule back-up, and then migrated from that to the virgin out-of-the-box Mac. Done yesterday over an afternoon and evening, which was pleasantly fast considering it involved over 2TB ...

Out of curiosity, where does Calibre store the PDFs?


I believe the default is immediately within the home directory, with the unique author subfolders as per the first screenshot.


Screenshot 2023-03-06 at 16.19.50.jpg


However, I've just had a look at the Settings file and it turns out ...

My workaround:

Short Answer:
Convert the [none-DRM] epub to a pdf using e.g. onlineconverter https://www.onlineconverter.com/epub-to-pdf
Import into Bookends
Proceed as for pdfs.


Longer Answer:
I've consumed some time on this and perhaps providing a note may save others doing the same!

I ...

I have this problem with macOS Monterey 12.0.1 and Bookends 14.0.1.

I first noticed it when finder tags applied in DevonThink and showing correctly in the Finder disappeared from the tag display in Bookends pdf view.

Upon reading this post, using Bookends 'Add Tag' in the pdf display, I tried ...

Thanks - yes it does - in Finder I can do a right click to batch change al the the alias file names, replacing ' alias' with nothing.

That turns a showstopper into a minor inconvenience - at worst I have to relink the pdf with a couple of clicks if if I want to view it in Bookends. There are some ...

Thanks Jon

Could there an alternative route, using aliases in a new folder? One that would subsequently be used for pdfs new references by Bookends in the conventional way. It is quite easy to create aliases for all pdfs contained within a folder and subfolders, and to shift these en masse to a new ...

Yes that is right - when there are 20,000 in the reference folder (in individual subfolders) it is slow, even though Bookends only knows about 45 of the pdfs.

Thanks Jon

Following your comments I've rebuilt the library, confirmed that the folder containing all my pdfs (in subfolders) is set as the Bookends default attachment folder, and clicked 'Remove Paths...'. The problem persists for anything involving the display of a pdf, but not otherwise.

I'm ...