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Old 11-29-2012, 06:29 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
Very good advice, armsys, and only some of those I had read earlier. Very helpful indeed.

Now, for the risk of appearing dumb as far as I'm concerned, let's clarify for new users or people like me who haven't been too much interested in importing otherwise than text content, with some pictures / graphics here and there, but muse what could be possible, otherwise - I might be mistaken in what follows:

In UR, there are 3 ways for processing content:

a) Just link. In this case, content is not indexed, hence not searchable from within UR. This might be the case for linked .mht's, and linked .pdf's - or are just-linked pdf's UR-searchable? Or, is no such external file indexable here ? (but see b)

b) Embed. With embedding, an external file stays outside of the UR db, but is linked, and its content is (necessarily? or are there other indexed

c) Import. Here, the external file is stuffed into the UR db (which means it will bloat it, etc. - so in any case we don't miss something by just embedding, embedding is preferable to importing, so why ever import a file into UR to begin with? but see below).

In this case, everything (?) is searchable? Probably not, since UR presumably doesn't "know" special file formats, which it can import = stock, but not index. So, which file formats are indexable here? I suppose .mht (?), and certainly .pdf, right? Also, Word files, I suppose, .txt, .html, .rtf?

If I understand well, both b and c will have the same indexing characteristics: a file format that is indexable in b, is indexable (and that always means, searchable) in c, too, and vice versa - but is that so?

And, if I understand well, the only (?) advantage of c over b would be that the external file will be exported within the corresponding UR sub-tree, whenever you export that, since it's contained in it; on the other hand, embedded files would need to be manually moved / copied within a folder that would accompany the corresponding UR sub-tree (= exported into a neb UR file), and any such file you don't move / copy, will produce a broken link within the UR tree, and worse, whenever you search for their indexed content, it will probably produce false hits, when in fact the source for these indexe words isn't there anymore.

Sideline: Even when you manually move / copy the embedded files in question, you'll probably get broken links, since the name and / or path of the corresponding folders will not be the same anymore - which makes me muse that perhaps UR could have have implemented a comman which would update the path, on condition that you have the folder name (= last part of the path) unchanged; this solution would help UR users to embed a max of files, instead of having to import them for the sole reason of them staying "transportable". EDIT: And there might be a routine implemented into UR that does "verify the links to embedded files within the selected subtree and list any broken links".

And finally, the sole difference between a) and b) would be that b) automatically indexes linked files and otherwise presents these b) files as the a) files, within the tree? Both would appear as links there, and it's just your knowing that e.g. Word files are indexed, that would make you know the link for file abc.xyz is not indexed, meaning it's just a link, and the link for file abc.doc is indexed, meaning this link is an embedded file?

I suppose that there might be some people here in this forum that would be as thankful as I'd be to have all these questions answered, in a systemtic way, i.e. if somebody knowing the details of putting files into UR retook this schema a-b-c here, but with the respective corrected info in it.

Last edited by schferk; 11-29-2012 at 06:37 PM.
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