Files within files within files?

[Sara]

I’m really confused with the use of files as rems.
I’m trying to create a database of journal articles that I will eventually get around to studying and making notes on, individually. Since I already had these pdfs in my local files, I am testing how to organise this in my knowledge database.

First I created a normal rem with the title of the article and then uploaded the corresponding pdf to the source, and tagged the title with the categories that article belongs to. So it looked like this:

But then I realized that when I uploaded this file, it became a rem on itself on which I can directly write my notes, by clicking view highlights. So then I thought it would be better to have my list of articles go directly to this “file-rem”, as it feels like I’m eliminating an unecessary step and instead of having to aim to the little bullet point to see my file and notes, I can just click on the title. Also, the tags are now hidden, which in my case serves me better so it’s not so visually overcrowded.

But then because I want to be able to write my notes and see the article side by side, I shift-clicked on the file link when it’s opened on highlights and suddenly the name of the file changes to untitled.
So, something that used to look like this:

Now looks like this:

And I can keep going, because I can in turn go to the highlight page again, shift click on the link which now has no proper title but just a string of random characters pointing to a local file, and if I shift click on that then everyting becomes untitled and who knows what is happening. Not sure if this is a bug?

My local files start with the name of the first author and a bunch of other metadata that is renamed automatically by zotero so that I can easily search for what I want. I thought it would work the same in remnote but it appears I cannot search in remnote for the name of the actual file I’ve uploaded. The fact that this file name just becomes “untitled” if I go into it too much is also not great.

So not sure if I should just go back to my original method? What are people doing?

[Martin]

My personal workflow is more similar to your original one - I have a folder of papers I’m reading, create a new document when I’m ready to read a paper, and add the PDF to the source. This allows me to open the notes side-by-side and conceptually separate “my interpretation” from “the source material”.

A few questions:

1. When you say “the tags are now hidden”, what do you mean?
2. When you say that it’s easier for you to click on the title, could you just make the reference directly to your note instead?
3. When you want to search for the name of the file, do you mean the “file_name.pdf” or the title of the paper?

The ability to recursively shift-click sounds like a bug; we’ll get that fixed.

[Sara]

1 - You can see in the printscreens above that in the original method the tags appear on the side, which makes it quite busy looking, while on the second method there are no tags on the side. I’ve tagged the files the same, but the tags only appear on hover or when I go into the file.

2 - I don’t really understand what you mean here. Would I have to create each article document/rem separately and then link to them in this folder? If I just create rems by writing up the article names in their respective folder page I can’t figure out how to make the whole title a link.

3 - I would have liked for the file_name.pdf to be included in the search, mainly because it already has the author name and a bunch of metadata from zotero. But I can see how that may be complicated to do, so I guess I’ll just add the author name manually also in the source or on the notes.

Thanks for the help!