For the organised (or unorganised) packrat, Yojimbo is just one of those tools that you have and 99% of the time it’s in the background, ie. I just throw stuff into it and know it’s there safely in the background where I may need it, one day, like say, tax time.
Sometime ago I was working on a project that required me to store PDF’s in a backend database, but, during the import I needed to extract some key meta data from the file and present it in a sidebar info panel about the document being worked on.
Anyway things went well - we used a variety of sample PDF’s in our testing, everything from client provided Windows MS Office PDFs, Acrobat PDFs and a few from Mac OS X’s “Print PDF” function. Of course on day 1 of the update going on trial we got a user report that the system has thrown up an error and wouldn’t import a PDF.
Well Yojimbo just did the same thing to me, and it turned out to be the same sort of problem.
Long and the short of it was the client provided file (which they hadn’t provided previously) that was encoded by a web library and it was different from every other PDF we’d encountered. After a few days fiddling around we’d made a work around for the differences raised by different encoders (ClibPDF Library in that case). Don’t get me wrong, the library wasn’t the issue it was simply that we hadn’t allowed for the variations different encoders could present us.
Back to Yojimbo, Where possible we get our bills by email PDF and I’ve been throwing them into Yojimbo. Unfortunately one the providers has recently changed their encoding library and now Yojimbo throws up this error dialog:
Opening the file in Preview, didn’t give any errors and a “Get Info” shows the encoder is “[ClibPDF Library 2.02-r1-2] 220e Solaris SunCC”. Doing a quick “Save As…” solves the problem for Yojimbo. A nice extra is that meta data like Title:, Author:, Description: and Keywords: are preserved by Preview.
So if Yojimbo, throws up the same/similar error try opening the file in something you know works, like Preview, and do a simple “Save As…”
Hope this saves you some time!
I've been described as a lost technocrat or a wondering luddite, personally I just like everything that takes us forward.