PDF Files in NVivo 9

1] Importing 45 PDF documents at once (FAIL)

2] Importing 15 PDF documents at once (FAIL)

3] Importing 5 PDF documents at once (FAIL)

4] Importing 4 PDF documents at once (SUCCESS....THEN SNEAK-FAIL)

The sneaky part is that it works most of the time. So I added 16, and then it crashed, and now I get to add them again, because I didn't save.

5] Importing 4 PDF's at a time and saving after every one (SHOCKING FAIL)

When it crashes, for some reason it removes all the PDF's you've added in that session. So I've now successfully imported the same PDF's 3 times and then lost them.

6] Avoiding importing PDF's as much as possible (SUCCESS?)

Definitely a success for the soul-crunching demons in charge of my computational self-efficacy. I'm making the PDF articles I was trying to import into External sources...which basically removes the benefits of using NVivo for this task.

This is probably a good idea because having too many big internal sources seems to really slow NVivo down. Like, saving takes 20 seconds or so.

Apparently some PDF's are un-importable.

I've found 2 varieties:

1. NVivo says it needs a password to open the file. The file opens fine otherwise, but when I did a save as it said "The font 'Symbol,Italic' contains a bad /BBox." Unforgivable.
2. NVivo dies when it looks at the file. I don't know how to find these other than opening each one in a batch to see what damage it does.

I guess it's supposed to get better in a year.

See Lit Review post for how I solved this (or, as the case may be, meekly submitted to the immutable forces of developer-focused software development).