# Evernote's new PDF viewer is beautiful, but it's like a new skin over old problems 2025-03-25 **Perhaps it is time to remove Evernote from the toolbox of options I suggest to my clients.** Let’s start with the toolbar, which was beautifully redone, but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing new there. Actually, I’m missing an important detail — that, to be honest, I’m not sure if existed before or not. #### Where is the undo button? ![[vladcampos.com/_files/2025-03-23-evernote-pdf-toolbar.png]] Using **cmd+z** (Mac) works fine, so the function exists. If they forgot about it, I hope they bring it back as soon as possible. If it wasn't there, it seems to me that this was a missed opportunity to add it. Meanwhile, the options '**Select all annotations**' and '**Clear annotations**' in the dropdown menu help circumvent that. But keep in mind that '**all**' means only those on the page being displayed. By the way, I think the dropdown menu is a pleasing addition. The quick access to the ‘**Fit to page width**’ option is a great start to making this a viable #PDF reader. Which brings us to a problem so many of you have been complaining about to me over so many years. #### It's a view, not a reader ![[vladcampos.com/_files/2025-03-23-evernote-pdf-dropdown-menu.png]] If the tool doesn’t remember the page we were on when we closed the PDF, it's just a viewer, not a reader. And that is only one of the details that has been preventing me from using #Evernote to read long documents. When reading and taking notes, I was used to relying on a PDF reader instead, but that came with an inconvenience. Evernote couldn't be the place to store the PDFs. It's true that one can use the 'open with' option to open the PDF using another reader. But as far as I know, this is only available when using the desktop client, and we've been living in a mobile-first world for a long time now. When the Files feature was added, I presumed that the final goal was to give us direct access to the files we keep in Evernote, but that never happened. Actually, even after all the time that has passed since it was released, it is still a half-backed feature causing more confusion than anything else. ![[vladcampos.com/Toolbox/Evernote/Evernote posts|Evernote posts]] #### Another step towards Obsidian A long time ago, I moved all my PDFs to #Google-Drive , but that ended up creating all sorts of inconveniences. Ironically, the idea was inspired by how Obsidian stores our files. Fast-forward to today, I gave up on the workarounds. I'm now reading my PDFs using whatever app I feel like, and, at the same time, the files are kept organized in #Obsidian. Having the PDFs visible in the computer file structure creates a lot of freedom to do many things. ![[vladcampos.com/Toolbox/Obsidian/Obsidian posts|Obsidian posts]] #### Bugs, bugs, and more bugs Back to Evernote. Another nice touch in the dropdown menu is the ‘**Include annotation summary**’ option, which in the past used to be a buried checkbook that many people didn’t even know was there. This is a nice feature, which adds new pages to the beginning of the PDF, including all the annotations. Unfortunately, something is now broken. As illustrated by the video below, many of the PDFs I tried, created a messed up page. Furthermore, the summary now seams to only be visible in the note view. In the past, these notes were also visible in the PDF view mode.  There’s another inconvenience that makes Evernote challenging to use as a PDF reader. If you watched the video above, there’s an annoying flicker happening every time a page is turned. And I’m pretty sure this was not there before. On that same note, if we use the thumbnail to jump to a specific point in the document, that page opens in the middle of the text. And that’s precisely where starting at the top of the page would be a much better option. I would like to end this post with a more optimistic view for the future of this feature and Evernote in general, but I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible. The new Files feature is not the only one half-backed. Many of the new features are simply not useful as they are, and more often than not, they arrive with new bugs. Frankly, I'm tired of trying to tell Evernote's team that the 'moving fast and breaking things' strategy should not apply to something so important as our personal notes. This will deeply sadden me, but maybe it is also time to take Evernote out of the toolbox of options I recommend to my [[vladcampos.com/Consulting/Consulting Services|clients]]. ![[vladcampos.com/_embedded/After Post|After Post]]