Evernote - clarification about offline use in Windows

The local database is not encrypted, but it is associated with your account. If you sign out of the app (perhaps because you use multiple accounts with it or just don't want someone else to be able to open the app and see your notes on a shared PC where you're using a shared Windows account) and then disconnect from the Internet, you won't be able to access the database because it can't authenticate and authorize you to open that database file. You could access the data in it with another app since it's not encrypted, you just can't open it in Evernote.

A quick search leads me to believe (as a non-user) that you need the paid version in order to use the PDF highlighter, but not to highlight in regular notes. Highlighting in a PDF works differently from regular notes, because with notes an app can just store the data in whatever format the dev wants to store it in, because it's their own app and database, but PDF has its own specific way of storing those changes.

bkaral said:

Evernote seems like the best fit so far. I have some questions about its use offline.

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As you've found it's not designed as an off-line product. Unfortunately not sure on good alternatives here... let us know what you find!

continuum said:

As you've found it's not designed as an off-line product. Unfortunately not sure on good alternatives here... let us know what you find!

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It's not just that it's not designed as an offline product, as it can function offline, with no syncing, just local notes. Online functionality is just some added features. The real complaint is that it's yet another product that moved to requiring you to register even when there is no benefit (for some users) to registration and no functionality that you're using that has anything to do with being connected to an account, and even if you're not using the online features, the app is talking to their servers about your account. But that's just the way things are now.

Of course, Notepad, as ridiculously overblown as it is getting, still works fine for creating notes that are offline.

Evernote is great still as an app. Just crippled behind an expensive for what it is paywall, the free version if further crippled. Syncing online/offline is fine. But the Free limit is like one device?. Which makes it kinda of useless beyond what it was 2 years ago?

I now pay for Joplin. While it's not as good with tables on the app. It does online/offline syncing. Or even Local only. And multiple other products do too. Look at the Evernote article Ars posted when they were bought out and on the brink of shutting down. You'll find many alternatives in the comments. But most opensource ones will do it in Markdown as you mentioned.

What about OneNote? You already have a Microsoft account, it's free, and it does support local notebooks should you not wish for your files to be in the cloud. And local notebooks are just .one files in a folder.

bkaral said:

Joplin looks...different. Does it do highlighting via the GUI or in markdown only?

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I think markdown only? But again find that article about evernote on the main page. There are a ton of suggestions. I only picked Joplin because it met all the criteria i needed and at the price i was willing to pay. Meaning i'm not beyond throwing a few dollars at a project to keep it alive.

Obsidian can be used local only and supports highlighting. It's also free if you aren't syncing.

It's designed more like a text editor than Evernote or Joplin, and uses markdown files instead of a database. The GUI works fine, it just inserts the markdown syntax for whatever option you selected in the UI. Then that stuff is hidden when you move your cursor elsewhere.